Mike's commentary · The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, Chapter 2

The "Introduction" and "Chapter Highlights" in this chapter were summarized by an AI editor based on the main text below; they are not things Mike said during the lecture. The main text comes from Mike's commentary, and the blockquotes are Seth's original words (the parts Mike read aloud).

Introduction

This chapter discusses the relationship between collective beliefs, public health propaganda, and disease, pointing out that mass communication and pharmaceutical advertising often constitute negative collective meditation, inducing or aggravating illness through fear and suggestion, while also explaining the body's self-healing ability and how religious and scientific beliefs weaken the sense of physical and mental wholeness. The chapter further explains the openness of events and the changeability of memory, how past, present, and future influence one another simultaneously, and uses television and Framework 2 as analogies to explain how individuals select events at inner levels, but only in ways that serve the best interests of all concerned.

Key Points of This Chapter

• Collective meditations such as public health campaigns and pharmaceutical advertisements often reinforce illness through fear and suggestion, rather than promoting health.
• The body naturally possesses self-healing and protective functions; prolonged generalized fear causes the body to release stress through specific illnesses.
• Beliefs in religion and science that demean the body, emphasize sin or chance, create a sense of worthlessness and a mind-body estrangement.
• Events are always open and changeable; memory changes according to present beliefs, and past, future, and present simultaneously influence one another.
• Framework 2 serves as the creative source; individuals choose and participate in events at inner levels, but events must serve the best purposes of all concerned and cannot be imposed upon others.

Main Text

We begin with Chapter 2 of Part 1 of The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events. This part is still the latter half of Session 805. Seth first announces the title of this chapter: "Collective Meditation, Health Care Plans for Disease, Epidemics of Belief, and Effective Spiritual 'Inoculations' for Dealing with Despair."

He says:

Although in this book I will point out some unfortunate aspects of individual or collective experience, at the same time I will also offer effective suggestions for solutions.

I will not only point out some of the errors in our human individual and collective beliefs, but will also give effective suggestions. He mentions an old saying he has used before:

What you pay attention to, you get. Your mental images bring about their own completion. You do not need to do anything; you only need to hold an image in your mind, and that image will complete itself on its own.

That is to say, you must take good care of the image in your mind. Our mass communication system sometimes does it right, and sometimes does it wrong.

These are ancient maxims, but you must understand how your mass communication system has magnified both positive and negative problems.

He then goes on to say:

Perhaps for a while I will emphasize how, as individuals and as a civilization, you have undermined your own sense of safety. Yet I will also teach you how to strengthen a necessary sense of biological integrity and psychic understanding, so as to enhance your psychic and physical existence.

Religion, Science, and the Sense of Worthlessness

Your beliefs generate feelings of worthlessness. When you artificially separate yourselves from nature, you distrust nature, and often treat it as an enemy.

Your religions gave man a soul, but did not acknowledge that other species also have souls. Your body was relegated to nature, while your soul was given to a holy, flawless God the Creator who looks down upon you from on high.

Your scientific beliefs tell you that your entire world came about by accident. Your religions tell you that man is sinful, that the body cannot be trusted, and that the senses can lead you astray.

Religion is like this, and so is science. He says, within such a labyrinth of beliefs, a person's sense of value and sense of purpose are largely lost, giving rise to pervasive fear and doubt, and life is often stripped of any heroic quality. The body cannot respond to a generalized threat, so when the body is placed in such an environment, it is kept under constant pressure.

We human beings are always in this kind of unknown, yet self-frightening, persistent fear. The body is in this fear, yet cannot concretize it through physical or biological means, so it keeps growing. Nowadays many people's stress is getting greater and greater, and there used to be a very fashionable term called "sub-health." The advantage of this term is that it does not say you have any illness, only that you are a bit worse than a healthy state, but still healthy. Yet we are often in this kind of "sub-health" style, indefinable fear.

The Body Is Naturally Designed to Protect You

He said:

Your body acts to protect you by its very nature; it is designed that way. The body accumulates a very strong tension, and it is always acting to protect you. On many occasions, a definite illness or a threatening condition is created so that the body can free itself from a tension that has become almost too strong for it to bear.

The body originally has the ability to protect itself and heal itself, and this ability should alternate between tension and relaxation. When a person feels safe, the immune system is not so sensitive, nor is it in such an urgent state of battle readiness. But when you remain for a long time under that generalized, imagined danger, your immune system and your defense system keep working all the time. Always on a war footing, preparing every day for battle, thinking bad guys are coming, viruses are coming, but they never come. This tension, like a rubber band, keeps being stretched and is never released. When it is stretched to the point where it can no longer be endured, the body may actually create an illness so that the defense system can fight a "real enemy" and release this tension. Many people's illnesses come about in just this way.

Public Health Campaigns as the Most Tragic Form of Collective Meditation

Many readers are familiar with meditation. Meditation is the focusing of attention on a specific area. There are many methods of meditation and many schools of thought, but the results are all similar: a state of mind that is highly susceptible to suggestion.

Entering a meditative state basically places you in a state of mind that is susceptible to suggestion. It basically places you in a state detached from the physical senses, similar to hypnosis. And within it, the person pursues goals of the psyche, the spirit, or the body.

You cannot go into meditation without a goal. You may say, "I have no purpose," but the very act of "going to meditate" is itself a purpose. The problem is that many media outlets, public health programs, and commercial advertisements also provide a kind of collective meditation, and this meditation is quite detrimental to us.

Unfortunately, the various media, many public health programs, or commercial statements provide you with a most tragic form of collective meditation.

In it, the obvious symptoms of various diseases are listed, and individuals are further told to examine their bodies while holding those symptoms in mind.

Many health campaigns and experts come out and say: these are the characteristics of high blood pressure, these are the signals of cardiovascular disease, these are the warning signs of stroke, this is how to self-examine for breast cancer. These statements in themselves are not frightening; what is most frightening is that they often also imply to you: even if you have no observable symptoms, you may still already have those diseases.

They may even imply to you: even though I have listed these symptoms, there are still many people who may experience those diseases without any observable symptoms. Even though they feel perfectly healthy, these miserable, specific illnesses may still occur.

This is tantamount to telling you: do not assume you are healthy right now; you are also in danger, and a fatal disease may strike at any moment. Some time ago in mainland China, a 23-year-old girl working at Pinduoduo, under continuous overtime work and physical fatigue, died suddenly on her way home from work at half past one in the morning¹. This news became a very hot topic during that period. Experts came out to interpret it, reminding everyone to pay attention to rest; the intention was of course good, but at the same time he was also telling many young people: no matter how young or healthy you are, you could die suddenly. Similarly, many campaigns say that young people can get cancer or leukemia without any warning. As a result, everyone begins to grow suspicious and worried, afraid that one day illness will fall upon them.

Medical Advertising and the Suggestions of Preventive Medicine

Here, those religious, scientific, and cultural beliefs foster a pervasive fear, often forming a blueprint of disease. Within it, a person can find a specific focus. The person can say, "Of course I feel listless, panicked, or insecure, precisely because I have this disease."

A lot of fear makes people self-check, self-doubt. Especially breast self-examination. Seth says:

Breast cancer caused by self-examination and suggestion is more numerous than breast cancer ever cured by any treatment.

Nowadays, when women talk about breast cancer, it has almost reached the point where "mentioning cancer turns faces pale." Medical experts tell you from childhood how to self-examine, have your partner help you examine, and also have regular X-rays and mammograms. These suggestions themselves create a very unfavorable psychological impression of your own body.

The public health campaigns about high blood pressure themselves raise the blood pressure of thousands upon thousands of television viewers.

On television, experts talk about how high the incidence of high blood pressure is, how serious the consequences are, how it can lead to heart attack, stroke, sudden death. Many viewers get scared just hearing it, and their blood pressure goes up on the spot. You yourself do not know your blood pressure at that moment, but this fear may really make your blood pressure rise.

Therefore, your present concepts of preventive medicine give rise to exactly the fear that leads to disease.

These concepts undermine each person's sense of bodily safety, increase stress, and also provide the body in advance with a clear, detailed plan for illness.

But most importantly, these concepts increase the individual's sense of alienation from the body.

It makes you feel that the body is unreliable, that you never know when it will get sick. When you do not trust the body, it creates a sense of powerlessness. It is as if the body and yourself are separated, and you have no initiative at all. You get sick when you are supposed to get sick, it flares up when it is supposed to flare up, and you are just a person waiting for the verdict.

Your medical advertising likewise promotes disease.

Many advertisements relieve your pain through a product, yet actually promote that condition through suggestion instead, thereby making you feel a need for that product.

Headache medicine is a fitting example. No medically oriented advertisement or public service announcement has ever mentioned the body's natural defenses, soundness, or vitality and strength.

Nor do your television or radio advertisements pay attention to healthy people. Every day you talk about the sick people dealt with by medical statistics, but you do not study healthy people.

We spend all day studying why unhealthy people are unhealthy, yet we do not study why healthy people are healthy. The correct approach is actually very simple: just look at how those healthy people live healthily.

More and More Foods Are Being Added to the List of Disease-Causing Factors

More and more foods, medicines, and conditions in the natural environment are being added to the list of disease-causing factors.

Today they say dairy products are bad, red meat is bad, coffee is bad, sugar is bad, eggs are bad, fish is bad, and fat is bad too. If you listen to all of that, there is nothing left you can eat. I remember that about two or three years ago, British scientists published a paper saying that animal fat, such as lard—what we commonly call rendered pork fat—actually ranked second or third among the healthiest foods². Vegetables stir-fried in lard taste very good, but we have basically stopped touching it because we are afraid it is unhealthy. When this study came out, it was effectively a slap in the face to many people's understanding of fat.

We take it for granted that whatever we eat is what we become: eat fat, and it turns into fat. But that is not actually how it works. Everything we eat first has to be converted into sugar, and only then does the sugar turn into fat; fat cannot turn directly into fat. We are a finely tuned system, not a machine that turns into whatever you feed it. Many thin people eat quite a lot of fat and still do not gain weight; many overweight people are already being very careful, yet they keep gaining weight.

People in ancient times went to great lengths to obtain meat, eggs, milk, fish, and fat so they could survive. If you read The Yellow Emperor's Inner Classic, or other writings on Chinese medicine, they will tell you that meat was relatively scarce in ancient times because there were no refrigerators to preserve it, and ordinary families did not eat much meat. For older people, stewed minced meat—meat cooked until it is very soft, served together with its broth—was a very good source of nourishment³. But now science tells you that older people should eat light food, with as little fat as possible. Vegetarian diets are another example. I cannot remember whether she was from Britain or Australia, but there was a well-known vegetarian food expert who posted her vegetarian ideas and recipes on YouTube every day, talking about how healthy her diet was and how good she looked. After eating this way for a few years, she stopped menstruating in her thirties⁴. Later, she went to a doctor for an examination and discovered that her diet was the problem. The doctor told her to add fat, animal protein, and meat to her diet, and she returned to normal. But she did not dare tell anyone she was eating meat, and only admitted it publicly after a friend accidentally revealed it.

You can eat a little more of any food that comes from nature, eat a wider variety, and avoid a one-sided diet. The emperors of ancient China, as well as China's national leaders today, do not eat bear paws and shark fin every day the way you might imagine. Instead, their food is especially simple, but there is a great variety. They eat everything; the emphasis is on variety.

Yes, your food does contain chemicals that were not present in earlier times. But within reasonable limits, human beings are physically able to digest them. These things can also be beneficial, and we can make conscious use of them.

The way our bodies absorb and digest what we eat is a process far beyond the understanding of the average scientist. For example, some patients who have had surgery for colon cancer are left with very short intestines and can only rely on a scientifically formulated nutrient solution infused directly into their bloodstream. Those large bags seem to contain every nutrient, but if patients rely on them alone for a long time, their bodily functions decline sharply. The nourishment is actually not as good as what they would get from eating normally. Our understanding of how food is broken down and used in the body is still quite rudimentary.

However, when a person feels powerless and is in a state of generalized fear, he can even transform the most natural elements of the earth into things that harm him.

So now more and more people have allergies: pollen allergies, dust allergies, peanut allergies, lactose intolerance. It seems as though people can no longer tolerate their own natural environment. Allergies are especially common in Europe and North America. When you eat with someone, you have to let them order for themselves, because you do not know who is allergic to what. We live in nature, after all, and should not be allergic to so many natural things. It is fear that has made people start developing allergies.

Art Films and Hollywood Movies

Your television, along with your art and science, all combine to form a collective meditation.

In your culture, at least in literary and artistic circles, educated people offer you novels with anti-hero protagonists, often depicting a person existing meaninglessly, without taking any action sufficient to alleviate confusion and suffering.

Many art films and niche movies specialize in digging into the most fragile and darkest parts of human nature, believing that only this qualifies as art. What they show people is that the little guy can change nothing in the face of circumstances. Seth used very strong words:

Many incoherent novels are the result of this belief in human powerlessness. In that situation, no action is heroic, and a person is at all times the victim of a strange universe.

In those movies, a person suddenly suffers misfortune, the world is cold and indifferent, and resistance is futile. After watching, apart from feeling bleak, powerless, and depressed about life, you really cannot get any more comfortable feeling. But personally, I feel that this kind of movie that specializes in exposing the dark side of human nature has become less and less common in recent years. Maybe I just have not been paying attention, or maybe they still exist.

On the other hand, those Hollywood action movies that are considered uncultured actually provide a certain service.

On the other hand, your generally uncultured violent movies and television shows do provide a service, because through imagination they make generalized fears specific in a particular situation, and then resolve them through drama.

Those plots may be formulaic, and the acting may be terrible. But in the most traditional terms, the good guys ultimately win, it is a happy ending, and individual action finally proves effective.

In many people's eyes, this kind of movie is mindless and requires no thinking. It is always a little guy who suddenly gets a chance to save the world, and the villain is taken care of by the good guys in the last second or two. Even talented films like Tenet or Skyfall⁵ cannot escape the cliche of defusing a bomb in the final seconds. But why can it sweep the world? Because it finds an outlet for releasing the pervasive, generalized fear that permeates our entire society.

It tells you: a little guy can also transcend circumstances and accomplish what he normally could not do. This sense of power is something people need. The Marvel hero series⁶ — Iron Man, Superman, Spider-Man, Batman — are filmed over and over again. The stories are really like something to amuse children, but people still watch them. These films build up a tense situation, then resolve it by having one person turn everything around, giving people the feeling that "action is ultimately effective." That is why Hollywood movies never go out of style.

A Person Must Feel That His Actions Are Effective

However, your more cultivated beliefs have led you into a more pessimistic picture.

In this process, even the violent acts of those pushed to extremes have lost their meaning.

Characters in art films also resist, but their resistance is ineffective too; in the end they are still crushed by society, crushed by the system. In Hollywood films the arm twists the thigh; in art films the arm can never twist the thigh. But Seth says:

A person must feel that his actions are effective. So he is forced to resort to violent action as a last resort, and illness is often that last resort.

When violent means also fail to solve the problem, falling ill becomes almost an inevitable final outlet.

Your police films, spy thrillers, and espionage films are simple-minded. Yet they relieve stress in a way that your public health advertisements cannot.

The viewer can say, "Of course I feel panicked, insecure, and afraid, because I live in such a violent world."

The previous fear was vague, faint, and impossible to pin down. After watching the film, he can find reasons in the concrete villains and the concrete world, and release the fear.

But these programs at least provide a dramatic resolution. Yet public service announcements continue to create unease. Those collective meditations thus reinforce the negative effects.

Those public service announcements that seem wise, moral, and cultured tell you how to prevent this disease and prevent that disease, as if with the best of intentions, but in fact they aggravate the negative situation. Many public service announcements are even backed by charitable funds while transmitting negative messages; by contrast, those purely commercial Hollywood action films provide a service.

Public Service Ads Treat Doctors Like Auto Mechanics

On the whole, violent programs provide a service, in that they often highlight the sense of power of individuals who transcend their circumstances.

Public service ads at best merely introduce the doctor as a kind of arbiter. Public service ads have no real benefit, except for one thing: they tell you that doctors are effective, and then you bring your body to see the doctor, just as you would send your car to a repair shop to fix some problem.

You regard your body as a vehicle that is out of control and needs frequent, careful inspection. The doctor is like a physiological mechanic; the doctor is like an auto mechanic, and he knows more about your body than you do.

The Interconnectedness of Society

He says these medical beliefs are entangled with your economic and cultural structures, so you cannot simply blame doctors and their profession. These doctors learned this medical knowledge and these medical beliefs in medical school, but do not blame them, because doctors themselves are also among the victims of the entire system. This is a holistic, mutually influencing society; it is useless to single out one profession for blame. If the whole does not change, there is no point in singling out any one profession.

Your economic prosperity is also part of your personal reality. Many dedicated doctors use medical technology with a spiritual understanding, and they themselves are also victims of their beliefs. Many doctors truly entered the medical profession with the mindset of healing the sick and saving lives, and the work of doctors is also very hard. So what he wants to tell you here is, do not focus the problem entirely on doctors. Doctors also want to heal the sick and save lives; they approach medical technology with a spiritual understanding, but they have learned too much medical technology, they have learned the things of the medical school system, and they came to believe them. They themselves are also victims of the entire medical concept, and they are the most severe victims of it; they believe it more than anyone.

If you do not buy headache medicine, then your uncle or neighbor may have no business to do, and cannot support his family, and therefore has no way to buy your goods, and you cannot separate one area of life from the others. Collectively, your private beliefs form a reality of your culture; your society in itself is not something separate from you, but is the result of the beliefs of each individual within it. It is useless to blame doctors or the medical establishment. You say, what if I just stop going to see doctors, we will starve them to death -- then would doctors have no income? Would doctors also stop consuming? Then would the people who usually buy the products and services that doctors purchase be affected? Those people would be affected, and those people would also reduce their consumption, and then ultimately it would affect you. So you cannot stand apart and be unaffected in this society.

Seth points out that our society is a whole in which everything is interconnected, and there is no social class that does not influence you to a greater or lesser degree. Doctors, as a social class, also influence you.

Beliefs of Science and Medicine

Your religions emphasize sin, and your medical establishment emphasizes disease. Our religion says people have original sin; your medicine says every person must watch out for illness. We often say that Western medicine, modern medicine, only looks at the disease and not the person. In its eyes there are only various diseases -- this person has several diseases, this illness and that illness, and it talks about them with great expertise, but it does not look at the person. The person is not important; the diseases on the person's body are the focus of its attention. Chinese medicine, on the other hand -- our ancient Chinese medicine -- does the opposite: it looks at the person and does not pay much attention to the disease. You will notice the phenomenon of treating the head by working on the foot: for example, if you feel discomfort here, it goes over there and gives you a needle; for example, if you have excessive internal heat, or your face is flushed, it does not go look at that problem directly, it works on some other place instead, such as adjusting your lungs. For example, if you sweat, Western medicine says sweating is a problem of sweating itself, that something has gone wrong with your body's system for regulating sweat discharge. Chinese medicine does not think so; Chinese medicine holds that sweating has many causes, many of which are caused by kidney deficiency, and kidney deficiency is further divided into kidney yin deficiency and kidney yang deficiency. Its viewpoint is completely different from the West's. It looks at the whole person and whether the balance between the person and nature has been disrupted. If the balance between the person and nature has been disrupted, how do we bring it back into a state of balance? The entire treatment philosophy of Chinese medicine is to pull you back into a state of balance, and your body will naturally get better on its own. If your body's balance is broken, then you easily fall ill.

Your orderly science emphasizes chaos and a creation theory without cause -- he is mocking science. Your science is certainly orderly; what our science emphasizes is definitely norms and order, everything is formulas and standards. Yet at the most central questions your science emphasizes a creation theory without cause. How did this world come to be? It cannot be explained clearly. How did the earth come to be? It cannot be explained clearly. How did human beings come to be? It cannot be explained clearly. How was life created? It cannot be explained clearly. None of these questions can be explained clearly. You say that is not right -- they gave you a forced explanation, and if you feel that explanation can make things clear, then you can believe it. But anyone with a certain foundation in science, anyone with an honest scientific outlook, if you go ask him, he will honestly tell you: it cannot be explained clearly. Science cannot explain these things. Just like an honest doctor will tell you that people heal themselves; medicine cannot cure much, it can only do some auxiliary work. For example, the simplest example, the one everyone often jokes about: medicine is so powerful, yet it cannot even cure a simple cold. It can only relieve your symptoms; it does not know how to treat your cold. It can only let the person go through a cycle of roughly seven days and recover on his own. It just uses some drugs to reduce or alleviate some of the symptoms in between, so your nose is not stuffed up, your muscles do not ache all over, your head does not hurt -- but it has not treated anything. It still depends on the person's own immune system; after seven days the cold will naturally get better. This is a very ironic thing. But on some seemingly difficult and complicated problems, it treats them very well -- for example, at the very microscopic level, treatment at the genetic level now, targeted therapy or gene editing. The latest technology can allow some blind people to see things directly through gene therapy. The treatment cost is not cheap, around 1.7 million US dollars⁷. Yet this kind of gene drug cannot guarantee absolute effectiveness, but it has a very high probability of directly curing a blind person. In ancient times this would have been called a miracle. Including thalassemia, a disease that previously had no way of being treated, now it can also be cured through genetic engineering⁸. So the most central point is that science emphasizes order, but on many questions it also emphasizes disorder.

Your psychology, on the other hand, emphasizes that people are victims of their environment. Our psychology insists on separating itself from the environment. For example, from childhood we are victims of the family environment -- problems of single-parent families, problems of the family of origin, or being bullied on campus in childhood can lead to psychological problems. In any case, psychology believes that your problems are caused by the environment, caused by your experiences.

What do your most advanced thinkers and philosophers emphasize? Our philosophers emphasize that humanity is abusing the earth. They keep telling us, standing on the moral high ground: we human beings are destroying the natural world, you humans are a cancer on the earth, your existence is a disgrace to the earth, you release pollution, destroy the environment, and cause many things on the earth to become non-renewable. They tell us this, and we feel quite guilty inside, as if just by being alive we owe the earth something. Or they focus on future disasters that will strike the world -- those scientists or thinkers tell you that an asteroid will hit the earth, that the earth's magnetic poles will suddenly shift, the South Pole becoming the North Pole and the North Pole becoming the South Pole, and then volcanic eruptions will occur, or else war will break out, two countries fighting each other and throwing atomic bombs at each other, finally blowing the earth to destruction. There is a great deal of this. Or once again they regard humanity as victims of the stars -- not long ago there was some alignment of four planets, some evil conjunction of Saturn and Jupiter and some star⁹, disasters on earth. There are many such ancient legends, and they are still effective today. Open YouTube now and take a look; especially at the end of last year and the beginning of this year, videos about astrology had very high view counts. It is as if we have become victims of the stars.

And here, many revived occult schools promote the death of desire and the extinction of the ego. "Revived" means things that have already been eliminated have come back by borrowing a corpse and returning its soul. Various occult schools and mystery schools, under the banner of ancient claims -- I do not know whether you have come into contact with them, but I have heard of them. One of them operates under the banner of original Buddhism. They say they are all original Buddhism, that they are some secret teaching passed down in secret, that present-day Buddhism has gone astray, and that they follow the true path. It is true that present-day Buddhism has places where it has gone astray, but the fact that present-day Buddhism has gone astray does not prove that they follow the true path. Then they launch into a round of criticism, and then they talk about how they practice, how pure they are, how primitive they are, living in Thailand, living in the primeval forest. There are many others I will not mention. These schools all share a common characteristic: they say desire is always bad, you must strangle desire to death, you must make yourself into a state of no desire and no seeking -- no appetite, no sexual desire, no will to survive, no desire for achievement, no desire at all. This is a master. What is a master? A person without desire is a master. And then, extinction of the ego -- must you be without self? If you still have a self, that will not do; you must eliminate the self, and only by eliminating the self is it thorough. In order to refine material elements to a finer level -- there is also a category of alchemists and essence masters who want to transform material elements into something like a golden elixir; if a person eats this immortal pill, he can live forever without aging. This refers to a finer level of material construction; it refers to this category. A branch of Daoism -- in ancient times many emperors believed in this; during the Ming dynasty many emperors believed in this¹⁰.

In all of these examples, the individual's clear psyche and biological integrity are obscured. In all the examples mentioned above, our biological integrity and our psychic integrity are obscured, and we are unable to grasp this precious present moment. This is its greatest harm -- it makes you pursue eternal life, pursue the Pure Land of Ultimate Bliss, pursue a future heaven and hell, but it alone does not let you properly grasp your present. It always proposes some illusory place more important than your present, or some more important moment -- what you think in the here and now, at this time and this place, is not important; your future is what matters. Where you can go, ascending to heaven, is what matters; being guided to the Western Pure Land of Ultimate Bliss to continue your practice is more important. It ignores your present; all these things are unimportant, and your final goal is always to go there. The only thing you can possess is now, is each of your present moments, is this moment right now. Apart from this you have nothing. This is the simplest truth.

We watched that movie a while back, Soul, or in English called Soul, in Taiwan called Soul's Sudden Turn. What it says in the end is exactly this truth, is it not? In the end the theme of the movie is this: every moment of your present is the most precious; nothing else matters. Life in the human world should be a unique, creative, living experience, yet in their eyes it has become merely a dim reflection of a higher state. What is a higher state? It is the state of our spiritual practice. They degrade our physical life, our life in the human world -- this life so full of the smoke and fire of everyday existence, so vivid and full of vitality -- into an existence that one is forced to depend on for the sake of a higher state of life. Practitioners often tell you that your physical body is just a stinking skin bag; they use all kinds of methods to degrade it.

But is this really the case? No. If your coming into this human world has no meaning, then why did you come? You say you are pursuing that state of the soul, but after you die you return to that place, or before you came you were also in that state, so why bother coming? Before you came, you were already in that state you want to reach, the state without a physical body. Without a physical body there is no desire; you have no bodily desires, no bodily entanglements, so before birth and after death you are both in that state. To put it in even plainer terms: you have plenty of time after you die to do that kind of thing; there is no need for you to do it while you are alive. Look at that movie -- after death he could not even taste a slice of pizza. After he reincarnated, just taking one bite of pizza and smelling that aroma, he already had that feeling. In the human world, a leaf falling into your palm, sunlight shining on your face -- those sensations were all gone. You have this thing and you do not want it; you insist on practicing a state that does not match your present moment. You think that one is a higher level and this physical life is a lower level. If you still have this kind of dualistic thinking, your level cannot be very high. Think about it: no matter which school or which lineage you study, your teacher will tell you, can you not have this kind of dualistic thinking? If you think something is higher and something is lower, the physical body is lower and meditation is higher, or the soul is higher, then with this dualistic thought, your level is still far off. So do not be influenced by these people.

Seth mentions again that we humans are easily brainwashed, easily drawn into a state of collective meditation; he keeps reminding you. Your body has become disoriented, deliberately sabotaged, because you are degrading it. Every primitive idea, desire, impulse, and thought of the body has been labeled negatively by you, but it simply has them, so what do you do? Then you start endlessly degrading yourself, dissecting yourself, criticizing yourself, and then through a series of so-called precepts and disciplines and practices you persuade yourself. Then after a while it comes up again, and there is nothing you can do, and then you fall into a confusion about yourself: what is going on? Why do I have no lofty ideals? Why are my tastes so lowly? With this kind of belief, your body does not know what to do. It feels that no matter what it does, it is wrong -- wanting to eat something good is wrong, wanting to vent this primitive desire is wrong, wanting to slack off is wrong, wanting to strive and earn some money is wrong, wanting to accomplish something is wrong, wanting to pursue fame is wrong. Then it truly does not know what it should do. Many people say that is not right; you can learn to be tranquil and empty. What does tranquil and empty mean? Demonstrate it for everyone; what is tranquil and empty? In the human world, demonstrate for me how to be tranquil and empty. So these things become a fight between you and yourself, your body and your spirit fighting each other; it does not know what to do. The clear communication lines between body and mind become blocked. Originally it was very simple, but as a result you blocked it; you stuck a bar in the middle and insisted on cutting it off.

Thus individual and collective illnesses and other conditions arise, which are intended to lead you into other understandings. He puts it rather nicely, but in fact it is to lead you astray, to lead you into other understandings. He just says it more nicely than I do.

This session ends here. Then Rob says great material, most heartfelt blessings, and it ends abruptly. Then he says at 11:59 and again at 12:00, good night Seth, having hoped he could stay longer, and it ended.

Rob and Jane's Personal Experience

Then at this point he made a note, and I found it quite interesting, so let me go through it briefly and quickly for everyone, because there is nothing difficult in it.

The first note: when Seth said this sentence -- which sentence was it? He said, what you focus on is what you get, what you think about is what you get, which was what he said at the very beginning of this chapter. When Seth said this sentence, he recalled that a few years earlier, in February of 1972, when we were vacationing in Florida, he had said such a sentence for the first time. At that time, we were worrying about the purpose of our lives, because in '72, life -- that is, their finances -- their financial situation was still not good, and what role the Seth material would play in our lives was also uncertain. In other words, they were unsure whether they should go find a regular job and not treat the Seth material as the main thing they could rely on for their future. They felt a very strong attraction to the seemingly simpler, more open, and pleasant life of the vacation, yet we felt we could not afford it. While he was enjoying the happy and pleasant life of the vacation, he kept telling himself that the two of us did not have that much money, and we could not afford to take vacations like this on a regular basis.

The reason was that his Seth material was information from the spirit world¹¹. This book had been published at the end of 1970, but sales were poor. This book was a summary of the transmissions from Session 1 to Session 510, covering six or seven years of material. He himself thought the summary was quite good, but actually, as you can see, I have never discussed this book, which is The Seth Material. It is actually a summary, not a standalone book. Later, in the 1990s, the entire early sessions were republished as a complete nine-volume set of the early session material. And the material the two of them summarized was based on their understanding at the time. Yet even up to the very end, their understanding of the early sessions was quite insufficient. They understood some aspects, but I can say that many of the most essential parts, or the most valuable parts, of the early sessions they did not understand. Some parts they simply listed out directly, but some parts they did not even understand, so they did not even list them. So in this process, the sales of this book were bound to be poor, because he organized material he himself did not understand, and he thought that such a miraculous event -- the material transmitted by Seth -- would make the book sell very well. It turned out it did not; sales were poor, so income was also poor. And at this time, Seth Speaks had not yet come out -- in 1970 he began dictating Seth Speaks, but it had not yet been published. From the time a book begins to be dictated to its publication takes several years.

So before our vacation, I had already given up my commercial art work. He had quit before the vacation; he no longer did commercial drawing. By commercial drawing I mean drawing illustrations or advertisements for others -- he no longer did that kind of work. So the two of them had almost no income. At that time, he was still working part-time at a gallery, going in a few days a week, and there was not much to do there either, so the part-time job brought in a little meager income, and the two of them lived on that income. After he quit, he felt that the cost of this vacation was too high, and they could not afford it. He said he did not know what he would do besides trying his best to help Jane. He did not know what he would do in the future, and he began to feel lost about life. Why? Because there was no money. At this time, the two of them were already one in his fifties and one in her forties, and their income was still unsettled. Under such circumstances of having no income and no security, you can imagine that they did not know what they should do in the future either -- whether to continue with the Seth material, or to find a job and live an ordinary life. They were not sure. So you can see that in everyone's process of development, it is not always smooth sailing. It is not like what you imagine, that as soon as a Seth book came out it was especially popular and then brought in a good income -- none of that happened.

Seth, on the final warm evening -- during the Florida vacation, on that warm evening -- gave them an excellent session. This was in '72, and he excerpted the content as follows:

The two of you have a relationship that is not only unique, but that can also serve as a springboard for creativity. You have talents and abilities that can bring you satisfaction, and you have the ability to live the abundant life you want. You often take these for granted with great happiness; they have become such a part of your existence that you often fail to notice them.

You think you have no real abilities. Again, that is not so. This ability is very strong, and it can bring you the life you want.

Do not confuse your joint position with that of anyone else. It is unique, and because it is, the possibilities are limitless.

Do not confuse the ability the two of you have together to transmit the Seth material, including your own abilities in painting and writing -- do not confuse these abilities with those of anyone else, and do not compare yourselves with others -- saying, so-and-so also has some ability and how much money he makes, and look at us at our age, already middle-aged or almost heading into old age, and our income is still unsettled -- do not have such thoughts. Your ability is unique, and because it is unique, the possibilities it brings are also limitless.

If you exaggerate your limitations, you draw a prison around yourselves.

If you limit yourselves, then you draw a prison around yourselves.

If you enjoy the freedom that is yours now, you automatically increase that freedom.

If you can enjoy your present abilities and enjoy your present life right now, you have all freedom, and you are also increasing that freedom. At that point, you are in a clear position.

You cannot expect a blissful time without any problems, for that is not the nature of life and existence.

This sentence is very important, and I hope everyone can write it down. Many people fall into a misunderstanding: they say, I have studied spiritual knowledge, and I have also studied Seth -- many people say, I studied Seth a long time ago, or I have studied Buddhism or practiced other things for many years, so why is my life still such a mess? Why does life still bring so many difficulties? This sentence has already made it very clear: do not think that after learning these things you will not encounter these problems. No matter what you learn, you will still encounter these problems. It is just that after you learn, the way you encounter these problems and the way you handle them, and your mindset, completely change. It is not that the problems stop appearing; the problems still appear. It is just that the way you view them and the way you deal with them changes. That is the key.

I remember one of the simplest sayings that I think is especially true, though I forget who I heard it from: what is the most painful thing for a person? Many people do not know. In Buddhism, suffering is the pain of not getting what one seeks -- wanting something and not getting it, wanting wealth and not getting it, wanting to be with the person I love but cannot, wanting a career that has not been realized. This is called the suffering of not getting what one wants, one of the eight sufferings. Birth, aging, sickness, and death are also four kinds of suffering, and there are three other kinds of suffering; Buddhism summarizes this in great detail. But another person tells you, this is not suffering; this is not the most painful thing. What is the most painful point? The most painful thing is that we think we should not suffer. This is the root of all your suffering. Be sure to remember this sentence. You think you should enjoy a blissful paradise, and you also think that there should be no such thing as suffering in your life. You have all kinds of reasons to say you should not suffer -- for example, I have money so I should not suffer, I have status so I should not suffer, I am like this so I should not suffer, I am like that so I should not suffer. Now you have an even better excuse: I have studied spiritual knowledge, so I should not suffer anymore. Who told you that? Who gave you that guarantee? Once you have studied spiritual things, you should not suffer? Suffering is a kind of challenge. Without this suffering, how can you challenge yourself? Just like after the psychological laws, the last of the five stages of the psychological laws -- in the final stage you must learn to embrace these things, embrace these challenges, embrace these sufferings, embrace these things that make you dissatisfied, embrace these things that constantly push you to develop your potential. So I will emphasize once more: the root of human suffering lies in the belief that one should not suffer. When other people suffer, one can understand it, because they should suffer; but when it comes to oneself, one thinks, why should I suffer? I should not suffer. One treats suffering as not being part of life. Just as happiness, joy, sweetness, and all these are part of life, suffering is also part of life. If you insist on not wanting to feel it, then there is something wrong with your own beliefs. Accept it calmly; when suffering comes, let it come; when it is to be accepted, accept it. As long as you do not get stuck in it, as long as you are not knocked down by suffering, just get back up, and that is all. It is that simple.

So Seth did not put it so directly; he said it very beautifully and artistically:

You cannot expect a blissful time without any problems, for that is not the nature of life and existence. Your kind of problems are the most creative ones; they are challenges, great potentials from which something can emerge.

Without these challenges, how could you achieve such great accomplishments? So treat all these difficulties as challenges.

When your creativity is utilized, and when you understand your problems, all of your energy for work and your creative drive will be released.

If you can creatively understand and solve the problems you encounter, if you can face your difficulties creatively and solve them, then all the energy for your work and your creative drive can be released. For example, if you are now facing financial problems, and this financial problem is very urgent and pressing, then it is a challenge, and you should concentrate your strength on solving your financial problem. This is an opportunity for you to develop your own potential. If finances are not your problem, but emotions are your problem, then concentrate your strength on solving that; if interpersonal relationships are your problem, solve that; if low self-esteem is your problem, solve that. Whatever your problem is, treat it as a challenge -- come on, I will solve you; I will solve you in a creative way; I will solve you in an unconventional way; I will solve you in a way that refuses to settle for mediocrity. That is your way of solving it. Not asking why the problem came; do not ask why the problem, but rather ask in what unique, personally distinctive, creative way you can solve this problem. That is where the value lies.

And in the future, abilities will continue to be released. But do not focus on those problems -- once a problem is solved, do not keep focusing on it; just do it, just solve it, and do not live in fear every day. This is what we often say: strategically, take the enemy seriously; tactically, take the enemy lightly.

And do not let them blind you to the joy and freedom that are already yours.

You cannot let these problems and these sufferings make you blind to the small blessings, the small joys, and the happiness of life that you already have. You cannot see only the suffering and fail to see the joy, fail to see the happiness, fail to see the freedom. What you pay attention to is what you get -- that is the sentence he said earlier in this chapter, and there is no other main law. Here he quoted his own earlier context again. Why? Because he felt it was important. This sentence is indeed very important. Whatever you dwell on in your heart day after day is what he will manifest for you. If what you dwell on day after day is your illness, and you say, oh, my illness, this discomfort, this pain, then he will make you suffer, because he thinks you want to feel suffering. If you say, oh, I have no money, look at how tight my life is, I dare not buy any luxury goods, life is unbearably painful, then your life will continue to be like that.

A Note on Mammography

The second note: regarding that statement about deaths -- or cases -- brought about by breast self-examination possibly outnumbering those it cures. Jane wrote this herself, because Jane was a woman, so she had a say in the matter:

I think the danger of negative suggestion is just as real as the specific dangers of overexposure to X-rays. No doubt some women have discovered breast cancer through self-examination, and doing so may have saved their lives. Yet we have no way of knowing what role such negative suggestion played in the very beginning. For some women, irregular self-examination will invite as much fear as the examination itself. And because these women's beliefs follow the official medical beliefs so closely, they are much better off doing the examinations.

In this example concerning health, and in all examples, each woman should weigh all the evidence, examine her beliefs, and make her own decision. That is, don't just follow the authorities, don't just follow others; you yourself should evaluate where these beliefs come from.

Seth did not mention this matter in tonight's session, but Jane and I found it extremely interesting that just last week, the whole country was abuzz with a debate that had been going on among cancer experts for two years.

What was that debate? Whether women, especially those under fifty, should have regular mammograms in order to detect breast cancer at an early stage. Those involved in the debate were the nation's leading cancer research organizations, such as the National Cancer Institute. Scientific advisors who had been conducting detailed studies of thousands of women of various ages had called for a suspension of screening for younger women. These scientists were on record as saying that such X-rays might cause more breast cancers than they cured. Hundreds of millions of dollars, and much time and effort, had been and were still being given to such research programs. Because of firmly entrenched belief systems, these studies were very hard to change. Even economic factors became important -- aside from the large sums of money involved in the official programs, many private radiologists also found mammography screening quite profitable.

Even now, it has changed again. Now they no longer do this; now it has become a vaccine for preventing cervical cancer, called HPV. Now in America, girls get the HPV vaccine starting from childhood. The recommendation is the earlier the better, starting around seven or eight, eight or nine years old. They say the effect gets better and better, and it can prevent a certain percentage of HPV viruses. What does the HPV virus bring? It may develop into cervical cancer. But HPV itself has no symptoms whatsoever in the human body -- whether or not you have HPV, you have no symptoms at all, and you feel no discomfort whatsoever. But they say it may ultimately lead to cervical cancer, so it has become a vaccine that everyone gets. The key point is that in America, it is free -- basically free. As long as you have health insurance, it is free. If you don't have insurance, before age eighteen you can also register for free at government medical facilities. But after this thing became widespread in America, it spread to China and to Asian countries, and especially in China, it became a very expensive charge. I heard that for the HPV shot, they distinguish between imported and domestic ones, and getting the vaccine costs several thousand yuan; if you get the imported one, it may cost seven or eight thousand¹². It has turned from an ordinary vaccine into such an expensive charge; it has become profitable. Whether it is actually effective or not is very hard to determine. You have to understand, they have their economic considerations; they are not entirely doing it for your good.

As for women today, should they have mammograms or not? There is a great deal of confusion. Unfortunately, the examination is by no means infallible. Because the interpretation of any X-ray film can produce misdiagnosis, including today's CT and even MRI imaging technologies, all of which have misdiagnosis rates. Yet misdiagnosis of the results has led some women who did not have cancer to undergo unnecessary mastectomies, often total removal. What is worse, all of these women must then live with the belief that they once had cancer, constantly worrying about when it might recur, and always having to be alert for signs of recurrence. Because they never had breast cancer in the first place -- they were misdiagnosed -- but they were told they had breast cancer, and so they had double mastectomies. Then for the rest of their lives, they constantly worry about when it will recur, constantly checking whether various symptoms indicate a recurrence. But since there are no symptoms, they become paranoid -- is this a symptom, is that a symptom? At the same time, they must also undergo more regular X-ray examinations to check for recurrence. They may also have insurance and employment problems.

One controversy related to excessive radiation exposure, but less known to the public, concerns prophylactic subcutaneous mastectomy. What is this? It is a surgery that some women choose to undergo before cancer develops in one or both breasts. These women are told that, according to statistics, they are in a high-risk group for breast cancer. This is terrifying. They will say, oh, your parents, or your immediate family members have had breast cancer, so your risk of getting breast cancer is very high. Therefore, in order not to get breast cancer, you should strike first and have your breasts removed. But removing the breasts is not aesthetically pleasing -- for a woman it is not aesthetically pleasing -- so what to do? They leave the skin. This involves the latest diagnostic technique: by studying the tissue and density of her breasts, they prove that she has the possibility of malignancy. Before malignancy, there will be signs or symptoms of cellular change, namely changes in breast tissue density. Then at this point, she undergoes a preventive surgery: the surgeon leaves the nipple and the skin of the breast, then fills it with rubber, plastic, or silicone to restore the shape of the breast. Back in those days, around 1978, this was already very popular in America.

A few years ago I saw a news story about a famous American actress -- I forget her name -- who, because genetic screening showed her probability of developing breast cancer was 60%¹³, the doctor told her this rate was already very high. She was quite decisive: she went all the way and simply had her breasts removed -- removed them for fear of getting breast cancer. But at that time, the doctors who disapproved of the necessity of such surgery far outnumbered those who approved. Most doctors did not approve: nothing is wrong, you are perfectly fine, why cut them off? As I said before, you are taking an extreme measure against an unknown, possible risk with only a certain probability.

Those opposed to such surgery spoke of possible errors in diagnosis. Again, negative suggestion dominated the present and was projected into the future.

Because this negative suggestion that you will get breast cancer dominates your present, and is also projected into your future. Because this person is told that she is at the mercy of her own bodily functions, which can go wrong at any time -- she might develop breast cancer at any moment, so she has no choice but to strike first. Can you imagine how terrifying that is for a person? Even when a prophylactic mastectomy is performed, it is not foolproof, because some women still developed breast cancer at the nipple site.

Still, Jane and I found it very curious how many statistically at-risk women underwent surgery they did not need. For surely a considerable number of them would never have developed cancer, though of course that percentage is unknowable. If we could show that the majority of high-risk women would get cancer, then there would be no controversy over whether such mastectomies have universal value.

The key point is that we have no way of knowing this proportion. Those who were misdiagnosed, or those who would never have gotten it but were cut anyway -- after the removal, there is no way to prove it anymore. She no longer has them, so how could she develop cancer? So this becomes a case with no possible resolution.

Nevertheless, to address the matter directly, because of this controversy -- with all the experts arguing -- women are once again confused about who is right and what they should do. They don't know whom to listen to; both sides of experts sound reasonable. Large-scale studies, including those done by the National Cancer Institute, are planned to explore the entire question of prophylactic mastectomy. But in terms of the overall direction, the whole country's direction is still moving toward preventive removal. The general direction is still early prevention; it is just that the accuracy of prevention is debatable, but they still hope to remove things in advance through preventive means.

Rob's Summary

He said I will summarize in three small points, and this is a summary Rob himself made.

First point, other institutions and individuals in the medical and psychological fields are researching the connection between emotional states and cancer. This goes without saying, it is already very widespread now, that is, emotional therapy and psychological therapy are all part of this system, and the relationship between emotions and cancer is very, very, very obvious.

Second point:

Jane and I both fully understand the contribution that medical science has made to our civilization throughout the world.

He is not denying the contribution that modern medicine has made to the civilization of all humanity. In terms of our current collective belief as human beings regarding personal vulnerability -- that is, being easily harmed by external forces -- the medical practices now in use are an important part of that civilization. Remember its premise: its premise is that we humans believe we are separate from nature, that nature is external, that we are an independent existence on our own, and that we are susceptible to harm from nature -- for example, allergies, the impact of a bad environment on our health, the impact of food, and so on. As long as such a belief is still the mainstream premise, modern medicine has its important significance for existence, because it was born precisely to address this.

Third point:

From Seth's perspective, he is merely trying to give us a much broader understanding of human abilities.

From Seth's point of view, he is simply telling you humans that your abilities -- including your own self-healing ability, your healing ability -- are very powerful, and he has explained very clearly how diseases come about. Seth is just giving you a greater understanding.

Regarding that last item, he said:

I, along with Rob and Jane, ask readers to look at the previous session, because in it Seth not only discussed the body's natural defensive abilities, and how the body immunizes itself, but also examined our negative cultural beliefs about the body and disease.

In the previous session Seth said a bit more. We think his material is so good that it is worth reading several times. Indeed, because the Seth material is too much, too complete, too deep, too broad, and many times after we read for a while we forget what he said earlier. So sometimes you can record the things that interest you personally, for example which session he said it in, which chapter, and the reason I always emphasize whether it is Session 800-something or Session 500-something, or Session 600-something, is because that way it is easier for you to find, easier to look up. Because some things in here may suit you, and some things may not be needed by you for the time being, so you do not need to pay too much attention to them. Just record the chapters that are important to you, and when you want to listen again or read again later, it will be very convenient, otherwise you will not be able to find it. Sometimes you just forget, you only remember that there was such a thing, but when you specifically want to find it, you cannot. Because there are many passages in here, and when you listen carefully a second or third time, you will have a deeper understanding and feeling.

Session 806

This session began at 9:30 p.m. on Saturday, July 30, 1977. Seth said that, obviously, after the previous session, this was the first session written for the book The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, but there was an eleven-week gap between the two sessions. What happened? He stopped for eleven weeks in between.

Seth said, what exactly were he and Jane doing during all that time—which was almost a quarter of a year of our physical lives, that is, three months? First, after Session 805, they rested for six weeks, not holding any kind of session. They did not plan to do this, but it just happened. They eventually understood that it happened this way because of a simple need to change their routine. They had many other things to do, all related to the book. On the 14th of this month, their contractor began converting half of their garage into a real writing room, and added a large back porch. All that construction activity was much noisier than when they built the front porch, and it disturbed us more, disrupted them, and forced them to make some changes in their schedule.

Strictly speaking, this session was not a dictation for The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, but Jane and Rob placed part of it here because Seth discussed events and memory with a different emphasis, touching on some aspects of reincarnation. All the themes sprang out of that ineffable, truly indefinable quality he called "simultaneous time." Rob asked readers to always keep firmly in mind: no matter what topic Seth was discussing, or from what viewpoint, all the linear, solid experience and history translated by our physical senses were based on that kind of time of his. Let us always remember that no matter how we think of our time, our time is based on Seth's kind of time. True time is psychological time; our physical time and clock time are both built on this psychological time. True psychological time is what has meaning.

For the sake of clarity, Rob also kept this in mind. Seth, as he himself defined, is nonphysical, a personality whose essence is energy. He does not seem to be so absorbed in the passage of time, not as concerned as we are. Yet, as early as January 8, 1964, in Session 14—that is, Session 14 of The Early Sessions—he told us:

Therefore time, for me, still has a certain reality.

Seth said that although he does not pay attention to our time, our time still has a certain reality for him. What does that mean? It means that if Seth wants to transmit material to Rob and Jane, then he has to abide by the practical laws of this three-dimensional world. So no matter how he understands the time of our three-dimensional world from his perspective, he must, on his level, make a kind of match with our time, or a kind of adjustment.

The Creative and Open Nature of Events

The following is what Seth said:

For events are not solid, finished things that are handed to you.

He said the events we experience are not, as we think, already completed and fixed in their solidity. Then memory must also be a different story. Our memory is also different. So, is what you remember really what truly happened? Not necessarily, because you often change your memory.

He said:

You must remember the creative and open nature of events.

What must you remember? That events are creative and open—this is their nature, and it has always been this way. Because even within one lifetime, a particular memory is seldom a true version of a past event. We remember some things from childhood, things that happened in past years, and they are not necessarily the true version. What you remember is not necessarily the true version.

How to explain this? It is hard for someone who has not experienced it to understand. The simplest way, if you want to try it, is to go in through hypnosis. If you can find a good hypnotist, or if you can hypnotize yourself, how do you go back to the past? It is simple: you go back to the past through emotional substitution. You imagine a past event that left a deep impression on you, then you imagine your own emotions and state at the time that event happened. You focus on that kind of emotion and state, then imagine the scene of the event as it happened, imagine it in your mind, focus on that scene. At this point, close your eyes. If the hypnotist you encounter is very good, they will bring you into that scene from back then. Once you go in, you will have different changes and feelings, and you will discover that the event was not as you once remembered it; many things you did not remember will have changed.

Like an example I gave before: there was a person who always remembered that in elementary school he had a very, very best friend. Then for some reason, the two of them later fell out. In his memory, his newly bought pencil case was stolen by that child. After going home, he did not dare tell his parents that the pencil case had been stolen, so his parents took him to the school teacher. The teacher investigated and said, wasn't the pencil case right there with his good friend? That was the event as he remembered it.

But later, when he underwent hypnosis, in the hypnotic state he discovered that this was not how it happened. He and that good friend were extremely close, and that friend's family was perhaps not very well off financially, so he gave that beautiful pencil case to his good friend. But after giving it away, he could not explain it at home. He had no way to tell his family, "I gave this thing to someone else," so he said, "I lost the pencil case." And because he had to make sure his parents believed him, he kept saying the pencil case was lost, lost. This caused the event to become such a process in his memory.

He said that when he entered hypnosis and returned to that event, he discovered that his good friend—when he went to report to the teacher that it had been stolen, rather than that he had given it to this child—the look in that child's eyes was something he could never forget. Because at the time he was too afraid to face this matter. For a child, this kind of pain: he had clearly given it to someone, but then he reported to the teacher that he had lost it, and then let that student be caught and scolded. And that student's family was already not well off, and to carry the reputation of being a thief on top of that was even worse. He could not bear such a state, so he forced himself, or in his subconscious believed that this matter really was like that.

Of course, that original event was experienced by each participant from a different perspective. Even for the same event, every participant saw the event from a different angle. So this is what he means when he says that for an event, you can only see one side of it—only the result that you, as the participant, as one party involved in the event, can see.

Let me give an example, such as a breakup between a boyfriend and girlfriend. From the man's perspective and from the woman's perspective, the event of the breakup itself is two completely different things. Although many details, many events seem to repeat in the same way, in their two memories, it may be two completely different things. Because they can only see this event from their own respective perspectives as participants, and each treats the event seen from their own angle as the truth; they will not look at the matter from another angle.

Regarding this, I remember a movie—I forgot what it was called—where something happened on a bus. A girl was harassed by a man on the bus, and someone nearby saw it, filmed it, and posted it online, and it immediately became a hot trending event. Around the occurrence of this event, the truth of the matter was not actually as the video presented it, and a whole series of subsequent stories unfolded. And there are many movies and plots like this. If you watch movies, you often see such shot replays and flashbacks, where the event as felt by the person involved and the real event may be from completely different angles or completely different feelings.

Therefore:

The meaning and basic significance of an event will also differ according to the focus of each participant.

The impact of this event on a person's life will change according to the different focus the participant had at the time. For example, if at the time he only looked at the matter from his own perspective, then this event happened as such, and it was such a story. When he is able to stand in the other person's shoes and look at the problem, then the story becomes fuller, or more objective, or more comprehensive. And when some time passes, after that youthful, reckless era, when he has matured, and he looks back at that event with a mature perspective, the feeling may be different again. So the same event, under different life experiences, different states of mind, different perspectives, different angles, yields different meanings and impacts on a person's life.

He said:

In your terms, the given event, as it first happened, began to act upon those involved.

In our terms, that is, according to the sequence of human time, when this event first happened—according to our human sense of time, an event always has a very first beginning stage. The moment the event happened, the participants began to be drawn into it. Then each person brought their own background, temperament, and truly a thousand different colorations to the event. Therefore, although this event was shared by others, each person still remained primarily original.

According to the time sequence of our three-dimensional world, the moment this event first happened, the first participant was drawn in, then the second person was drawn in, and perhaps more participants. Each participant brought their own background—that is, their own persona, the role they played in this event—as well as their own temperament, their way of handling things, their tone of speech, their angle of seeing things, the height of their awareness, and a thousand different personal emotional colorations, into this matter. Thus such an event became, although a shared experience among multiple people, still an event with its own originality for each person. Because their version of the story is different from the versions of the other people in the event.

So he kept emphasizing that events are creative and open from the very beginning—this is their nature. Many people will be stubborn about this, saying how history will be, what the facts are; we humans always want a proof, a fact, a historical truth. But once you learn this, you will find that this truth is always in the process of changing. The so-called truth you speak of depends on what angle you look from and whose standard of truth it is. It is easier to understand it this way. Once you have studied spirituality, you will not be so stubborn about things, and you will take many things more lightly. The reason you take them lightly is not that you no longer care about them, but because you know that the same event is different in everyone's eyes, and all of these are real.

Events Begin to Change from the Moment They Happen

From the very instant an event happens, it begins to change. Why? Because the participants bring a thousand different colorations into it, and they dye it.

It is infiltrated by all the other elements connected with that event, and it is further minutely altered by every subsequent event.

Events are not isolated; one event is nested within another. For example, a breakup between two people will lead to many, many changes in details: the two begin to separate, move, change cities, find new jobs. These subsequent events will all have subtle influences on the earlier event.

What does it mean to have subtle influences? People say, can that still change past events? Yes, it can. Do not regard the past as a finished, dead thing; it can be changed. For example, two people separate, and the result of the separation has two different possibilities: one is that the two may never have anything to do with each other again; another possibility is that the two, for various reasons—whether they still have intersections in life, perhaps they still have mutual friends—still maintain some contact. These two different possibilities will each have more or less subtle changes and alterations to the earlier breakup event. Two people who do not want any contact, and two people who still have contact afterward—these two situations give them two completely different feelings when they look back at that event.

If I put it this way, you may be able to understand. People say, but that is just a difference in feeling; the event itself has not changed. Then you are wrong. The impact of this event on you is precisely your feeling about it. How you perceive this event, how you feel about this event—when you think of this event, whether you are happy, pleased, or hateful, or peaceful, or whatever state of mind—that is the influence and change this event has on you. It is that simple. So what the event itself actually was is not important; how you regard the event, how you feel about the event, how you perceive the event—that is what matters. The fact of the event itself depends on your perception of it.

And each person in this event, because they were drawn into it, also has an influence on the event itself. Let me use the breakup example again, because this example is easy to explain and can apply to everyone. For example, after the breakup, the girl meets an even better man, better than the previous one, and then the breakup becomes a good thing for her. If after the breakup she does not meet a better man, and the men she meets are each worse than the last, each one not as good as her ex-boyfriend, then this breakup becomes an eternal pain for her. So for the same breakup event, do you say the later events have an influence on the earlier event? Of course they do.

At this point you should understand why it is said that "the present can change the past"—that is the "point of power" in the present from The Nature of Personal Reality. We need to do that exercise, to change all those things in the past that you thought were bad. Here he expressed that point of power again in another way.

Thus:

In the formation of a memory of an event, the present and the past carry equal weight.

When we discuss the memory of an event, our present perception and state of mind are just as important to the event as when it happened in the past. You can understand this from the example I just gave. And what is the issue? The issue is that you are still alive, you are still open, and you do not yet know what will happen later. For example, with the breakup, perhaps after the breakup you found a man who was very suitable, very happy, and after two years he may break up with you again. Then new resentment plus old hatred, you will think, "Men really are no good," and the emotional investment of two relationships both yielded such a result, and you get a kind of damage-multiplier effect. So for those two years you thought the breakup was good, but two years later you may think the breakup was really bad. And half a year later you may meet another man, and that may change your state again.

So your present is always the most important. Your present determines your view of every past event. When your present view changes, those past events also change. Those things you thought were bad, because of the change in your present beliefs, will become good things, become necessary steps in your success. If you think the present is bad, then I am sorry, every event that happened in your past becomes a stone thrown at you when you are already down in your current bad circumstances. If you feel that you are living well and happily now, then no matter what happened in the past, it is all adding flowers to brocade, because those things made you who you are today. All of this past is not important; it depends only on your present belief. This is the reason Seth repeatedly emphasized that "the present can change the past." Those who can understand this will immediately feel suddenly enlightened and completely relaxed. Those who cannot understand will still be struggling with how exactly to use the present to change the past.

The Triggering of Memory and Neurological Pockets

Let us continue reading.

Of course, associations trigger memory.

Memory is triggered by associations.

And associations also help to color and form the events that organize memory.

Seth again emphasized that memories are triggered by associations—triggered by the brain's associations. For example, you pass by a certain coffee shop again, and someone you once loved, you had some beautiful memories in that coffee shop, or some bad memories, and this will have an influence on you. But he said these associations also help to color and form these events. This is the example I just gave: if your impression of this coffee shop is beautiful, then even if the breakup happened in this coffee shop, you will still regard the breakup as a very beautiful thing. At the time you could not accept it, but when you look back on it in memory, you will find it was a beautiful experience of youth. Conversely, if you have a very bad impression of this coffee shop, then every time you think of this bad thing or pass by this coffee shop, the memories it brings you are all bad.

He said:

You are accustomed to a time structure.

We humans are accustomed to a time structure, so you remember something that happened at a particular time. We always arrange events on the axis of time, hang events on this time axis, for example, something happened on a certain year, month, and day. In other words, events without time do not exist. And true time—of course, this is how it is in the three-dimensional world, but in other worlds, time does not exist, while events do exist. From our perspective, in our time structure, we categorize every event like a library classifies things: this is 18th-century classical literature, this is a painting from some century, or poetry from some century—according to era, according to type, according to its characteristics, we classify this event into the large grid of time.

He said:

Usually, you can place events in that fashion.

We all arrange our events in this way. One could also say there are certain neurological pockets—what he means is that in our brain's nerves, you can think of them as pockets, and each pocket contains different stories, different memories, different events of ours.

Therefore, physiologically speaking, when the body's perceptual activity occurs, events can be placed into them.

That is, when your body—the physical, biological, physiological—perceives an event, you place this perception into this mental pocket. For example, you experience a wonderful dinner: this feeling, the overall atmosphere, the food, the meal, the wine, the music, the environment, the person across from you, and so on—you place all these things into a mental pocket. Where does it come from? It comes from your physical body, from your physical perception. You transform this physiological perception into a kind of mental information and store it. This is one way we form memories.

Those nerve impulses are coordinated with the main biological world you know.

The nerve impulses in those neurological pockets—nerve impulses are the events, the events you remember. Nerves are measured in units of impulses, so the events in your neurological pockets are equivalent to a series of nerve impulses. Where does this series of nerve impulses come from? It comes in coordination with your biological world. Whatever your biological world feels, that is how it feels. This point is very subtle; you must remember it. Your biological reactions are stored in your memory; they are not stored as the thoughts or ideas you had at the time—although ultimately what is stored is a kind of mental storage, it comes from your biological perception. So many people will bring deeply memorable tastes, scents, feelings, including some music, and the perception of the environment at the time, the bodily sensations, into those memory scenes.

Memories of Past and Future Lives

He said:

In those terms, by contrast, memories of past and future lives often remain like ghosts.

According to this way of speaking, everything you have experienced, everything your body has experienced, forms such a memory in your neurological pockets like nerve impulses. From this angle, your past events—the events of your previous life, and the events of your future life that has not yet come—will all exist in your memory pockets, in your neurological pockets. So this is different from our ordinary understanding. We know that the past of this life is easy to understand, but how could we have memories of a previous life? And if memories of past lives are understandable, that such retention can be understood, then how could there be memories of future events that have not yet happened? There are just as many. Past, present, and future happen in one time. You feel they do not exist because from your perspective, but they have all already happened. The future has already happened; yesterday has not yet ended.

He said:

Overall, this is necessary.

Such a design is necessary, and also required, so that the body's immediate responses can be concentrated within the time period you perceive. What does "necessary" mean? It means turning these memories of past lives and future lives into ghosts. What is meant by calling them ghosts is that you cannot see them. Are they there? They are there. But you cannot perceive their existence; they are vague and indistinct. Many people ask what encountering a ghost is like. Encountering a ghost is a feeling; it is not like what you imagine, that encountering a ghost means you see something. People who have truly experienced this know that if you are fortunate enough to have dealt with ghosts, you will find that the state of experiencing a ghost is a feeling; you just know something is there, rather than actually seeing something.

He said that memories of past lives and memories of future lives—which for you have not yet happened—will all exist in your memory, but you have no way to access them, just as you cannot see ghosts. Why is it designed this way? Because you need to have concentrated responses to your present, current life in the physical world; you cannot bring them all out and confuse your present concepts, confuse your present cognition. So you can only concentrate on your immediate, present responses.

Memories of other lives—that is, memories of the previous life and the next life, or memories of several previous lives and several future lives—can be said to be carried along under certain impulses, under those other impulses. But those other impulses are not the impulses of this life of yours; they are associated with other impulses. In a manner of speaking, they never pause long enough to be examined, yet they form an undercurrent beneath the memories of your present life.

What is an undercurrent? It is like drifting on a river: you paddle a kayak or a raft, drifting from upstream all the way downstream, and what you see is only the things on the surface of the water: the waves, whether there are rocks on the surface, or trees, or the current course of the river. And the memories of your other lives are like the undercurrent beneath the surface that you cannot see. Is the undercurrent important? Of course it is. Because what you see on the surface is only the surface; the most important part is the undercurrent of the entire body of the river beneath. But you cannot see it. In other words, the undercurrent determines what you can see above. If there is a whirlpool below, sometimes you can see it above, sometimes you cannot, depending on the size of the whirlpool and the terrain where it is located.

He said:

Here, when such memories of other lives do rise to the surface, such other lives—that is, memories of other reincarnational lives—when they truly rise to the surface, sometimes this happens.

Some children will say, "Was my past life somewhere?" Many such people can remember their past lives. Of course, he is then colored by that surface. When in this life you can recall memories from other lives—perhaps a future life, perhaps a past life—then he is colored by the memories of this life. Take, for example, that Mars boy from Russia¹⁴. Let us not first debate whether he is real or fake, let us not verify him for now, let us just talk about this matter. He says he reincarnated from Mars. Then can we understand him from another angle? Say that he brought a memory from the future—a memory from a future life or some future lifetime—and not necessarily a memory from a past life. This boy says he came from Mars, and he surfaced in our era, and the easiest way for our era to understand that is that he came from another extraterrestrial, parallel space-time or something like that. But from Seth's perspective, it is more like he pulled out memories from his other lives and they floated up. Memories of other lives were supposed to be undercurrents at the bottom of the river, but they rushed up to the surface of the river.

After they rush up to the surface, they have to be influenced by the culture, technology, humanities, and society of our present river surface, and that is how they get explained. In other words, if this Mars boy had lived two thousand years ago, then the story he told could not have been told this way; he would have had to tell it in another way. He could not have talked about astronauts, flight, spaceships, because people of that era could not understand those things. But in this present era, we are already about to explore Mars, so many things match the present era. This is called coloring.

He says:

And their rhythms, you see, are not the same as your present rhythms.

Because that life, the previous life or the next life, their rhythms are also different from ours, and their time is also different.

But they are not as precisely connected with your nervous system as your normal memories are.

Memories of other reincarnations are not as precisely connected with the nervous system as our normal memories are. So those memories are sometimes very hard to explain, and even he himself finds them hard to understand, because he cannot place them within our time framework to understand them. Because their rhythms are also different, and their feeling of time is also different.

He says:

Your present gained its sense of depth because of the past as you understand it.

In certain terms, however, the future represents another kind of depth belonging to events.

A root grows in all directions.

Events are the same. A root, underground, grows in all directions, and events also grow in all directions. What does "all directions" mean? It means it grows toward the past, and it also grows toward the future, and it also affects the present in the present. The root of an event—if we suppose that an event has a root—then it passes through your past, present, and future. If you can regard an event as having a root, then what is the root of that event? It also flows through our past, present, and future.

We can understand it this way: from a certain angle, the future represents another kind of depth of an event. You can think of an event as having a different depth. For example, the past is also one kind of its depth—something that happened in a previous life, after it surfaces, you can see its influence on you in this life and your cognition of it, and its past life is the past of this event, and it represents a certain kind of depth. And its future also represents another kind of depth. So an event has many different facets, just like a tree root. A tree root grows in all directions, and an event also develops in all directions. But the difference from a tree root is this: a tree root grows in all directions, but however it grows, it is still a tip, a branch of the root. But he says the root of an event passes through our past, present, and future. Why does he emphasize this root? His meaning is that in the past, in the present, and in the future, the root of this event can all be changed. Once the root of this event changes, the event changes. This is also why we can change both the past and the future from the present—that is the reason.

How to contact memories of other lives

He says:

Often by deliberately trying to slow down your thought processes, or playfully trying to speed them up, you can become aware of memories from other lives—past or future.

This "other lives" refers not only to the past, but also possibly to memories of the future. He says, how do you obtain memories of your past lives or the future? He now tells you the method:

Try deliberately to slow down your thought processes, or playfully and deliberately speed them up.

Your thought processes—deliberately change their speed, do not follow the present time scale, and do not follow the present time structure to think about problems. You can constantly adjust their speed.

For example, meditation is a very good example. Many people feel that five or six minutes have passed in meditation, but it turns out that half an hour or forty-five minutes have passed—that is a kind of speed change. That happens in a meditative state, but now he is asking you, in a conscious state, to see whether you can adjust the process of your thinking.

What does it mean to slow down the speed of your thoughts? Many people do not understand. It means you have many thoughts and ideas in your head, and in your mind you turn over many thoughts in an instant. And basically we—sometimes we can keep up, sometimes we cannot; sometimes we keep up with some main thoughts, while some minor, peripheral thoughts we do not pay attention to and just let them come and go as they please. But at this time you tell yourself: I am now playing a slow-motion film, I want to take every thought in my head and watch it in slow motion. First slow it down by half, and see what the thoughts in my head are right now. Then I think about a problem—for example, my relationship with certain people, or how I should start my career, or how I should form a business partnership, and so on. Normally you think about this process at normal thinking speed, but at this time you consciously slow it down, that is, think carefully. You give yourself the suggestion: I am slowing down my thoughts, now playing slow motion, to see what is in my thoughts, to see how I think, how I made this decision, what factors I considered and what circumstances I considered when I made this decision. Then when you play slow motion, you will suddenly discover some details you had not paid attention to before, details you had not noticed before, in your mind—because you played slow motion, you noticed them. And these details had been ignored by you before.

Speeding up is the reverse. That is, give yourself the suggestion: I am now going to speed up the process of thinking about this problem. What does speeding up mean? It means playing fast motion. When playing fast motion, you only focus on the important key frames in your thoughts, or the key points, or the things that you can grab hold of. Because when you play fast motion, you cannot examine things that closely; you can only grab the flashes of brilliance in your thoughts. The unimportant things, or the things you did not catch at the time, just flash by. So you only grab these flashes of brilliance.

You can do this kind of exercise yourself when you have time—sometimes slow down, sometimes speed up. Of course, you do not have to do them together; you can do only slowing down in one period of time. When you become very skilled at slowing down, then you can go do speeding up—either is fine. Slowing down is easier to do; speeding up is not so easy. Speeding up is not swallowing things whole; it is not saying that I only focus on those points—that fast motion, although fast, does not drop frames, it does not lose the key things in between; it just means you can run through the process of your thoughts in a very short time without missing anything. Here you must remember, it is not what I just said, deliberately ignoring and missing something.

These two trainings are both one of the methods that can allow you to obtain memories of other reincarnations. When you do this exercise to a certain degree:

You allow other neurological impulses to appear on their own.

Other neurological impulses—that is, the neurological pulses he mentioned earlier, the other pulses stored in the neurological pockets that are different from your present pulses—are activated, or different neurological frequencies are activated, and they can connect with the memory bank of your past lives or future lives.

He says at that time these neurological impulses will appear on their own, and there may often be a vague, unclear feeling. It is not a clear feeling like the one in our three-dimensional world; it is vague and unclear. Because:

You have no ready-made time or place design to structure such memories.

Those memories of past lives and future lives cannot be structured with the time and place of this life, because they are not things that happen in our space-time. So in the present space-time, you have no way to arrange them into categories. When you have no way to organize these memories step by step according to time, nature, and type, the way you treat memories of this life, they appear to be vague, unclear, even chaotic memories.

He says:

Such exercises also involve you in the facts of the events of your present life.

What are you doing with such exercises? They also involve you in the facts of the events of this life. You say, what use is it for me to recall these things? What meaning does recalling these things have for this life of mine? It has meaning. Because it is an undercurrent of the events of this life; it is the undercurrent below. In other words, when you can perceive the vague shadows of events happening in the future or the past, you can know why some events in this life happen the way they do; you can know some of their deeper causes.

To put it more plainly, the events of this life may be a certain kind of depth of an event in a past life or a future life, or an extension of that other event—he said the root of events—an extension of the root system of that other event's root, which may extend into this life. So this exercise can involve you in the world of this life, and give you a deeper, more profound understanding of this life's world. When you discover many things and understand many events, the depth and breadth with which you look at problems are already different from other people's, because you are already looking at them beyond space and time.

Many people have been studying cultivation or spiritual practice, always wanting to escape reincarnation. Just as Buddhism often says, "leap out of the three realms, and not be within the five elements¹⁵," escape this reincarnation, not be within the six paths of reincarnation. Actually, you must have a belief system, a cognitive system, a spiritual system, a spiritual framework, a psychological structure corresponding to "not being within the six paths of reincarnation"—you can describe it however you like—that is, you must make corresponding preparations on the spiritual level, or on the psychological level, or on the spiritual level. If there is no such preparation, then pulling your physical body out of this material world and letting your soul escape reincarnation is meaningless. The moment you turn around, you will reincarnate back again.

Why? Because the attachments this earth brings you, the things your heart dwells on, will bring you back. Just as he said in the previous session: what you focus on is what will happen. You are still focused on certain things in this life—for example, you still like someone, you have not let go of him, then the moment you think of him, you reincarnate back to find him; you have not had enough of your career, you are still brooding over your career, you feel you could become the richest person in the world, you still have great ambitions that have not been realized—then this is what your heart dwells on, and the moment you think of it, you come back. I am just giving such examples.

So when you possess this ability, the depth and breadth with which you view anything are already different from ordinary people. You already have the state of being able to detach from this reincarnation or this incarnation. When you have this state, you can truly detach from this reincarnation psychologically. It is not about using some means or some method to detach you from reincarnation. It must be you actively detaching from this reincarnation. The reason for detachment is that you can put the past, present, and future together to look at them, to feel them together, to experience them together, to create them together. But at this time, whether you reincarnate or not, and how you do it, is no longer important to you. You can simultaneously experience many lives and many things. While you are living this present life in the present, you have already experienced life after life, millions of years. That is the process. So at this time, do you still need to reincarnate? You have already completely escaped the limitations of space and time. Whether in thought, in the spirit that goes with it, or in the thinking mode that goes with it, you are different, because the process of your thinking is already different from ordinary people's.

He says:

For automatically you will follow probabilities from your own focus.

You will automatically, following the interests of this life, the focus of your present interests, follow the existence of those probabilities. Because an event necessarily implies many possibilities. Its past, present, and future are all open to you, which means the event itself is open. Open means that what kind of story of this event you want to choose, what kind of plot and ending you want to choose, is up to you, because this event has not ended. When you have this ability, and you follow your own interests, or the focus of your consciousness, to choose and follow the probability you want, at that time you will have a feeling of being free and at ease in space and time—whatever you want, whatever you want to experience, you can experience it.

He says:

Within your system of reality, it is extremely difficult to operate without the pretense of firmly completed events.

In our three-dimensional world, we still must take these—clearly not firm, clearly not completed, clearly open events—and pretend that they are already completed and already determined. Otherwise this material world cannot continue to be played, cannot continue to operate. Because if everything were open and uncertain, how could we play? All of us could go back and change the past and change things—on that level it is possible—but in this material world, if it were like this, would it work? It would not. Because we must abide by the limitations of space and time in this world.

So since we live in such a material world of camouflage, and we know it is a world of camouflage, and we know that space and time are also camouflage, then we must pretend that this camouflage is real. It is like when children agree to play a game together, and you insist on exposing it by saying this is a game, the money you gave me is drawn by you, it cannot buy anything at all—if you insist on poking through the game like that, then everyone can only stop playing the game. It is that simple. So understanding this truth does not mean you must tell everyone, "Stop playing the game." Then what should you do? You should continue playing the game, and you should understand the deeper meaning behind the game or within it. The game itself is not important; what is important is the experience and feeling of the game.

Let me give a simple example. When children are little, they play war games, divided into two sides, one side the good guys and one side the bad guys, or both sides think they are the good guys. They play horse-riding battles, or all kinds of war games—everyone has played them. In the process of this war game, the game itself is very real, very exciting, very thrilling to the children, and they also cry—children often cry from playing, get angry, and so on. And this childhood game, compared with when they grow up and really join the army and really fight enemies on the battlefield, their feelings may differ in intensity. But their feelings and experiences are similar.

What does this mean? It means that game and reality are different things only from the perspective of different people. In other words, we think that for children it is a game, and that adult war is real. But if you stand at a higher perspective, a higher historical perspective, then how many of the wars that have occurred in human history seem like child's play? How many of them are so absurd? How many of them, from today's perspective, seem like child's play? Yet for the people of that time, that was real war raging, and it had a fundamental impact on the lives of every person at that time.

This life determines past lives and future lives

He says:

Now, in this life you form your past life, just as surely as you now form your future life.

Now, in this present life, you form your past life, just as surely as you now form your future life. You certainly believe that your future is determined by this present life—many people say so, they talk about cause and effect, saying that if you do good deeds and accumulate merit in this life, then in the next life you can have some benefits, and so on and so forth. Is this not what many religions have been preaching? Do good deeds in this life, receive blessings in the next life, and so on. Then he tells you, if you firmly believe this, then I will tell you: your past life, or your previous life, is also determined by this present life.

You say, how can that be? I know I influence the future, but how can I influence the past? I have already given the example earlier, so I will not repeat it; it is the same principle. If you can think through the example I gave of the man and woman breaking up, and how subsequent events affected his memory of the breakup, if you can think that example through, then you can also understand the past life, the present life, and the future. That is, your present beliefs determine the events of your previous life. What should have happened or would happen in your previous life—for you it has already happened, but from a higher dimension, the previous life is still happening, and it is still influenced by your present events. The root of your present event penetrates the past and also penetrates the future, and of course it also functions in the present. This is how it happens, in a way that is very hard for people in the three-dimensional world to understand.

Then he continues:

Each of your past and future selves now also dwell in their own way.

That is, the past you and the future you both live in their own way, in their own space-time.

For them, the last sentence of the previous paragraph also applies.

What does that mean? The last sentence of the previous paragraph says: "Now, in this life you form your past life, just as surely as you now form your future life." This sentence also applies to the self of your previous life, and it also applies to the self of the future. So for the future you, this sentence can also be said. Can you understand this relationship now?

He says:

Theoretically it is possible to learn much about that point through an intensive investigation of the events of your present life.

From a certain theoretical standpoint, if you deeply investigate certain events of this life, doing deep investigation and careful observation, you can discover these traces—that is, the relationship between you and your past lives and future lives. That is, this life of yours influences your previous life, and also influences your future life.

He says:

You can throw aside many conventional ideas and choose a memory, but trying not to structure it is a most difficult task, because by now this structuring process is almost automatic.

Theoretically, it is possible to do this.

Your present specific moment is the compression point of all the experiences of your past life, present life, and future life. Any moment in time is a gateway into all of your existence.

The openness and flickering of memory

The previous paragraph finally talked about how certain events of this life are actually traces of the relationship between past lives and future lives. Theoretically, deeply investigating certain events of this life can reveal these clues—because this life of yours influences both the previous life and the future life. If you can step outside space and time to look at events, you can clarify from the essence of the event its relationship with past and future lives.

But you cannot step outside. Because we have automatically arranged events according to the chronological order in which they happened: first you met him, then you started dating, then there was the breakup. We think things developed that way. Have you ever thought that you dated him for the sake of this breakup? The breakup may have happened before you met; in order to form this breakup event, you chose to go meet him.

If you carefully observe the time of this life, you can find these traces, these clues that the past, present, and future happen simultaneously. But humans do not think this way; we automatically arrange events step by step according to chronological order. If you consider problems or organize memories according to this chronological order, you will never be able to escape the settings of this three-dimensional space-time.

Undisturbed, unstructured memories will flicker. This is the hardest point—you do not assign a memory to any point in space-time, and you let the memory remain in an open state. When you truly manage not to assign it to this life, a previous life, or a future life, and not to assign it to a specific time, this memory will flicker, waver, and then take on other forms. It is different from traditional memory—traditional memory is firm, fixed, stable, certain—but this unstructured memory flickers and wavers, presenting itself in a way that we cannot explain with current human language. It may appear in a spiral form, or in a way that traverses space-time, or in a way of the spacious present, spanning all the lives of this person. It changes itself before your mind's eye in another way—right before your mind, before your thoughts, that memory undergoes a particularly obvious change. Its nature, its content, its meaning and influence on you are all different from before.

At this time its shape is like a psychological kaleidoscope. You have played with a kaleidoscope, right? Turn it once and there is one image, turn it again and another image; with different light, different angles, different rotations, you see different scenes. This memory is like that; it is not fixed, not like "on a certain day I had a meal with so-and-so," a fixed thing. That meal becomes a kaleidoscopic existence of possibilities.

For example, at a meal that was not important to you, you met someone. You do not know what relationship you had with him in past lives, why in this life you would eat with him at this point in time, and what effect eating this meal will have on your future life; whether the things you said to this person at this meal today have any effect on your past life together. In the psychological kaleidoscope, these thousands of possibilities will all be displayed. A simple memory becomes a root of all events, and through its point of the law of interchange, other events of your life will also flicker and change. The law of interchange is the law of thermodynamics¹⁶—one point changes, and the whole situation changes with it.

Memory exercises

Two exercises are given here.

The first exercise is to slow down or speed up the process of your thoughts, the process of your thinking.

The second exercise is to not let your memory be assigned to a point in time as usual, or assigned to a certain category. What I am talking about is not only time, but also category. For example, your relationship with your ex-boyfriend—do not assign it only to the relationship with this person, do not limit it to this person, and do not limit it to a certain point in time in 2014 or 2019. Strip away time, space, and people entirely, and let this memory hang there alone—that is, the matter of your relationship, without talking about the time background, the place, the event background, or the people background, only talking about the matter itself. When you have this ability, the event itself will change before your eyes. After it changes, you can see through this matter whether you and your ex-boyfriend had a relationship in a past life, and whether you have a relationship in the future.

This is a memory exercise: take the organized memories and strip them all apart, separating them one by one from the space-time structure of memory. Once the loosening begins, it will naturally bring in many things.

Edges, corners, and reflections will appear. If memory is a very large picture, you normally only focus on the most important part in the center, and you do not pay attention to the edges, corners, or reflections of the memory. But afterward you will observe these things. Some words, when read backward, will carry a different emotion.

These memories from other lives may overlap with the memories you identify as belonging to this life. You may discover that a certain memory from this life could actually be a memory from a past life, only overlapping with a memory from this life. In other words, you experienced something in a previous life, and you also experienced something similar in this life, and the two memories overlap. Before, you could not see the overlap; you only felt the memory of the present moment in this life. When you bring it out and examine it, you will discover: "Oh, so that thing in my memory was actually an overlap of a memory from my previous life. I had something similar in that life too."

The Way Memory Organizes Experience

Your memory has the function of organizing your experience. Our experience comes from memory, from the things we have gone through. By arranging and combining memories in different ways, we obtain different experiences. Take a breakup, for example. If you classify it under relationships, then it is a relationship matter; if you classify the breakup as an inspirational point, then it becomes an inspirational matter -- "Your girlfriend broke up with you because you had no house and no car," so then this breakup is no longer just an emotional point; it may be an inspirational point, and from then on you begin to work hard and strive. The same memory, depending on what kind of structure you place it in and how you perceive it, determines what kind of experience you obtain.

But how do humans organize memory? According to chronological order. Our cognitive neural sequence conforms to chronological order, or has its own order of strength, weakness, and emphasis.

Memories from other lives in the past and future, memories of other lives, memories of other sub-lives, often move in a motion so fast you cannot follow it, leaping away from those neural sequences. Memories of past or future lives cannot be structured according to our human neural sequence or chronological order -- because they are too fast, too fast for us.

What does "too fast" mean? The experience of this life of yours is just a few decades of experience, and the memories are only that many. Our brain can only remember this much. But we all know that the brain only uses a few percent of its capacity, so what is the rest of that unused portion doing? It may be recording all the things of your past lives and future. But those memories are not events that happened in our time and space, and they are far more numerous than the memories of this life. Suppose you have already reincarnated eight times in the past, and there may be twelve or thirty more reincarnations in the future. If you want to connect the experiences of those twenty-some lives with the memories of this life, the brain's computational power and cognitive capacity cannot keep up. The amount of information is too great. It can attach itself; at its own level, processing these things is easy, but your brain cannot process them.

The Leakage of Memory

In a quiet moment, you may remember an event from this life, but there is a strange feeling -- as if there are some things about it, some feelings that cannot fit into the time slot to which that event belongs. You always feel that this matter is not so simple, that it has a deeper meaning, but you cannot put it into words. That this thing happened at that point in time is strange, yet you cannot say exactly what is strange about it.

In such circumstances, the memory of this life is often tinged by another memory. Two memories have been threaded together, or overlapped, or influenced each other. A memory of a future or already past reincarnation projects its faint quality onto that remembered event. At this time, the memory of this life will have a floating quality, because it has been tinged by other memories from the past or future; two memories have been superimposed and strung together.

This kind of thing happens more often than we recognize. Usually we simply ignore those strange feelings -- "If it feels strange, just let it pass." But such examples involve a definite leakage -- a leakage of memory.

By remaining alert to this feeling and catching it, you can learn to use the floating portion of this otherwise recognizable memory as a focal point. Then that focal point, through association, can trigger more memories of the past and future.

How do you do it? When you are experiencing this strange feeling of remembering, you must catch it and not let it go. Place your attention on that floating memory -- on those vague, blurry things you normally do not pay much attention to. Once you place your focus there, it will trigger more memories of the past and future, because that floating portion is precisely the part where the past and future have seeped through and been caught by you. Through this focal point, on the frequency of that floating memory, you open up the memory frequency of that time -- just like tuning a radio to that frequency band, you can receive some memories of that frequency, rather than only paying attention to the frequency of the present time and space. Earlier he explained it as a kind of neural impulse, and the principle is the same: if you focus the neural impulse on the present time and space, you cannot obtain memories of past or future lives; when you can adjust the neural impulse to match theirs, you can obtain them.

Clues also appear more frequently in dreams. Because by then you have already become accustomed to that floating feeling -- in dreams, memory is inherently floating, so it appears more easily. In dreams, events can happen within their own relatively independent categories.

Events in dreams can happen in relatively independent categories, without necessarily being in our specific time and space. An event is an event in itself; its essence does not require time and space as a precondition. But humans believe that events must depend on time and space to exist, so they insist on stuffing every event into some time and space to fix it in place -- "This thing happened at a certain place on a certain day of a certain month and year," nailing it down. If you can loosen an event from this time-space category, letting the event return to its original appearance -- the form unrestricted by time and space -- then you can obtain memories of other reincarnations.

Those dreams that contain both past and present, dreams where future and past are mixed together, dreams where time seems changeable and unstable, are all examples. For instance, you dream of your deceased grandmother or grandfather sitting together with your current partner, eating and chatting, yet in the time and space of this life they never had any intersection -- you only met your current partner after your elder passed away. But in dreams this kind of thing often happens. This is a dream where past and future are mixed together.

The Present Moment Is the Condensation of Everything

In a certain sense, your past lives, present life, and future lives are all compressed within any single specific moment of your experience. From any point in time in this life, unfolding outward, you can obtain the experiences of your future lives and past lives. The present moment point is the condensation of your past lives, present life, and future lives. Human cognition and consciousness are temporarily unable to feel this, but after training with the three exercises mentioned earlier, perhaps you can have this ability.

Therefore, any such moment is a gateway into all of your existence. Any point in time in your life can enter into all of your existence -- all reincarnations, all states of life, all processes. You only need to fully understand this one point of the present, and you possess everything. So many practitioners tell you to pay attention to the present moment; this is not nonsense.

Those events you perceive as happening now are merely the definite and objective ones. But the experience of any specific moment, in its most minute components, is also a symbol of other events and other times. This explains why many practitioners tell you to pay attention to the subtle places in the present -- because within those subtle points are contained clues of other events and symbols of other times.

For example. In this present moment point of your life, you are meeting and chatting with a friend in a cafe. At that moment the cafe happens to be playing a piece of background music, so faint that if you do not pay attention you would not even notice it. But what you may not know is that this song may be the very one through which, in some other life, you and the person now sitting with you fell deeply in love. It was your love song, but you do not know it. Or another example: one day a friend sends you a song, you think it sounds nice and casually forward it to another friend, and the two of you are just ordinary friends. But your friend misunderstands it as a confession of love, begins to pursue you, and you accept, and a romance begins. Yet at the very beginning you had no idea why this thing happened the way it did.

Every moment is like an inlaid puzzle. In the history of your present life, you follow only one color and one pattern, and ignore the others.

As I have said before, you really can change the present to a certain degree by deliberately altering a memory event. That kind of synthesis can be used by many people in many examples. This is the function of the "point of power" in the nature of personal reality -- changes to the past affect the present. For example, many people have a bad relationship with their mother or father, and that deep memory has a great influence. If at this time you change this matter in your memory -- change it so that your mother truly, truly loved you very much, only that her way of loving you may have been something you could not accept at the time -- when you truly realize that she loved you, such a change in memory will have a very great influence and effect on repairing your present relationship with your mother.

Such a practice is not some theoretical, mysterious, impractical method, but is very precise, flexible, and full of vitality. It is not a purely theoretical, metaphysical thing, but something easy to apply in practice, very flexible and full of vitality.

It helps the present self by soothing the fears of a past self. Many people are affected in the present by deep fears from childhood or youth -- the fear of not being loved, the fear of being abandoned by their parents at any time, the fear that if they are not good enough their parents will not love them. When you change a past self that was afraid, the one who truly benefits is the present self.

That past self is not hypothetical, not a story we made up. The past you truly, really exists, and is still alive. Just like the you in fifth grade of elementary school, still carrying a schoolbag, still jumping out of bed in the morning to go to school -- he is still alive in that day of fifth grade.

Every moment point lives within that moment point. Suppose this life of yours is composed of one million moment points; the one million yous within those one million moment points all live within those one million moment points, all living in those worlds. You can go back at any time, return to that moment point, and at any time change anew what happened in that moment point, and it will have an influence on the other moment points. They are still alive. The past self is not a virtual, abstract concept; he is the real past you, right there, and he can be reached by you, can be held by you, and his reactions can be changed.

This process is full of vitality, playful, precise, and flexible. Just treat it like a game and play with it; no need to make it complicated, no need for rituals or ceremonies; play with it however you want. If you do not change it well, change it again; change it back; change it into another reaction. He can be reached by you, absolutely, absolutely so.

You do not understand how this can be so in real life? Let me give another example. The you right now is living here, listening to me, or wearing headphones while walking on the road -- this is a moment point. This moment point will not, as you think, cease to exist once you go home, finish the class, and take off the headphones. He does not exist in the next moment point, but he still exists within his own moment point. The self of your present time exists vividly, and you also know that the you of the previous moment point, the one concentrating on listening to the book, also exists. You cannot deny the existence of the present, so even less can you deny the existence of the previous moment point. You say the previous moment point is very close, I can be certain of it, but anything further back I am not sure about -- then let me give just one example: if you acknowledge the existence of the previous moment point, then by extension, you can prove that the you of the fifth-grade moment point truly exists, just as real as the you of one second ago.

The Point of Power

You do not need a time machine to change the past and the future. Many people are thinking about inventing a time machine, like in science fiction -- not necessary. You can return to the past at any time, jump to the future at any time, as long as you exercise the imagination of the brain, as long as you can take memory out of its time-space structure, peel it away from the time-space framework, then you can travel through time and space.

Why? Because what is so-called traveling through time and space, if not going somewhere to do something? Our lives are composed of these events. If you travel to the past, some events will happen; if you travel to the future, some events will happen too. For example, if you live five hundred years from now, your life, your present life, and your life five hundred years ago can all be entered through any moment point in time. For you, you can enter through any point in the present; for the future you, he can also enter through any moment point of his life into the self of five hundred years ago and one thousand years ago; the you of five hundred years ago can also enter through any moment point of that life into the self of five hundred years later and one thousand years later.

So now you understand where the power of the word "present" lies. Why does Seth insist that the present is your point of power? Why does he say this is the only place where you can exert force? Because you only have this one point where you can exert force; all of your power can only be used on this one point of the present, and it can change the past and change the future.

This technique is extremely valuable. When you learn to use the point of power to change the past and the future, memory is not only not dead; it itself is forever changing, and you can change it however you want. Many memories have already almost completely changed themselves, without your noticing. For example, some people suddenly recall something: "I used to think this matter was like this, how come recently I feel that the thing in my memory is not like that anymore?" For instance, the cognition and memory of classmates or colleagues you knew before, when suddenly recalled one day, may seem to have changed. Some memories change themselves on their own.

Jane's Example

In Jane's unpublished novel manuscripts, she wrote two or three versions of an incident that happened to a priest she knew in her youth. In different chapters or different novels, she wrote two or three versions. Each version represents a faithful memory she had of that event -- they were clearly different, yet she considered each one faithful. The basic facts they were based on were more or less the same: what the priest's name was, what church he worked at, and so on. But many details were already different. The overall tendency and interpretation in each version differed so greatly that the differences far exceeded the similarities. Because these episodes were used on two or three different occasions, Jane could see how her memory had changed -- the same priest, the story between her and this priest, had already become several versions.

However, in most cases, people do not notice this way in which memory changes; they do not discover that the things they remember are different from before -- they only recognize the last version.

The key point is: past events grow; they have not finished yet. Keep this in mind. Then you can see that, viewed from within your present framework, those future lives are extremely difficult to explain.

In your terms, a life that has been completely determined is no more complete or finished than any event. It is just that within your focus, there is a cutoff point separated from your framework.

This part is crucial. He says past time grows, and it is not finished -- this is the key point, you must remember it. The past has not ended; the past is still happening, still unfinished.

Remembering this, we can see that, viewed from our present time-space framework, those future lives are extremely difficult to explain. What does that mean? Let me put it this way: you stand at this point in time and look at your future reincarnations. From the perspective of the future, this life of yours has already ended -- because there is already a future life. But from the perspective of the present, when you use your imagination to envision the future you: the future you, in his time and space, when he imagines this past life of yours, he thinks this life of yours has already ended. And you, standing in the present, has this life of yours ended? Are all the matters already nailed down? Of course not; the future is promising, and there are many possibilities. But the future you does not think so; the future you thinks the past life has already ended, and can only look at the present and the future.

If you can change your perspective, and from the present standpoint think about how the future you thinks, then you can understand what is meant by "the past is still happening" -- we only need to switch identities to understand it. If you did not understand, you can go back and listen again.

The life you consider complete has never been completed at all. From the standpoint of that past you, he is still living, still going through his days; how could it be complete? It is only from the perspective of us who have come after, looking back at that past life, that we feel it is complete. The completion you perceive is mainly because there is a cutoff point in your focus -- the death of the previous life and the birth of this life, two important dividing points. Because these dividing points exist, you think that matter has already been closed with a period. This is where our focus has been placed.

If you do not place your focus on the moment of death, but push the focus forward, then is it not still happening? So it depends on where you place your focus. You think there is a breaking point, and everything before that point has been turned over, already written into history -- that is what you think. There is no such point.

This cutoff point, like the vanishing point used in painting, is artificial. The cutoff point we perceive between two reincarnations is like when you want to draw a three-dimensional figure in a painting, you must virtually assume a vanishing point -- this vanishing point is certainly not on the flat two-dimensional picture plane; it must be above or below the picture. Anyone who has studied painting or drafting knows this: through such a virtual vanishing point, a flat painting can become three-dimensional. If there is no vanishing point, or if there are several vanishing points, the picture becomes a mess and cannot form the scene of a three-dimensional world.

Death, this cutoff point, is the mark our three-dimensional world makes, saying "it is over." From a four-dimensional perspective, this cutoff point is virtual. This cutoff point can be placed at the angle of death, or at another angle. When the cutoff point changes, your cognition of this life will undergo a fundamental change. It is only because we firmly fix our focus on this one cutoff point that we have the view that "the event has ended and will not change again."

Without this cutoff point, events are continuous, open, and mutually influencing.

The Choice of the Inner Self

It is not that the inner self is unaware of these things -- it knows all the lives, the nature of events. But your inner self chose the time-space framework of this life of yours, and necessarily had to temporarily screen out those other time-space frameworks. Otherwise would it not be chaos? You yourself would not know what year, what month, what dynasty you were living in, would not know whether you were male or female, would not know whether you were old or young, father or son -- then how could you experience this play? How could you fully experience this life experience to the end? So the inner self knows, but it does not allow the outer ego to have this cognition. This is what you must understand.

The Positioning of This Session

At 11:05, Seth entered the more personal second part of this session, and began to discuss private matters -- he was explaining how Jane, in her own example, in this life gave her past-life self some present knowledge. Seth was talking about how Jane in this life gave her past-life self some knowledge. Her changes to the previous life in this life would also produce changes in this life. If the previous life possessed some knowledge it originally did not have, this previous life would produce a synthetic influence on this life -- a psychological synthesis -- and she would be better able to deal with certain challenges. This is the latter half of this session, but it was not included in this book.

This session is very important. Why was it inserted here? Jane and Rob transmitted so many Seth books, and they have this kind of sensitivity or intuition; they knew that this session, though seemingly unrelated to the book, is very important. It expounds the nature of events and memory, and then teaches us three methods for how to look at events from another angle through these methods, to obtain memories and experiences of other lives, to look at problems from the deeper and broader depth and breadth of events, rather than looking at them as superficially as usual.

Such knowledge is very important for our later study of The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events. If you do not understand that the nature of events is like this, it is very difficult to truly and fundamentally understand individual events and mass events, or the role of the individual in mass events. This part is actually an extension of the chapter on the "point of power" in The Nature of Personal Reality, and also a demonstration of probable events in Seth Speaks.

This part is a little mind-bending, but compared to other parts it is not especially difficult. For this book it counts as difficult -- because the overall theoretical difficulty of this book is not high, but the difficulty lies in how to apply it in practice, how to use it to interpret the events happening around you, such as the U.S. election, the Capitol Hill incident; you can understand these things from a broader perspective. The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events gives us tools to apply in practice and to adjust our own cognition. Its difficulty is not at the cognitive level, but at the level of application. This session is somewhat difficult compared to other sessions, because it discusses the simultaneity of present, past, and future, and shows it to us once again from the angle of memory.

Let us look at the content of this session -- Saturday, October 8, 1977, 9:43 p.m., Session 814.

Rob wrote a fairly detailed note. He said that, with the exception I will mention this time, they had again spent another long stretch of time, a full nine weeks, without book sessions. Previously they had stopped for about twelve weeks, and now another nine weeks, so more than thirty weeks had passed. Yet Seth and Jane were undoubtedly busy on all those Monday and Saturday nights. And Rob inserted Session 806 -- that is, the previous session -- into The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, which brought another series of sessions separate from this book. Compared with the ten sessions transmitted before Session 806, this time there were as many as seventeen -- a full twenty-seven sessions unrelated to this book. Again, these were all private or non-book sessions, and besides personal topics they also covered a very wide range of subjects.

Including the two large batches of material around Session 806, all of it referred to the past twenty weeks. Seth had only given one session for The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, which was Session 806 -- in the previous session he was talking about the true nature of our memory and events. Why memory can change, why past events are all open, why past, present, and future all happen simultaneously. Session 806 recounted this once again from the angle of memory.

Rob said that over the past twenty-some weeks, Seth had given only this one session for this book, while on other subjects they had had twenty-eight sessions. He joked with Jane that perhaps Seth had already finished this book and forgotten to tell them -- perhaps this would be his shortest book ever. Jane said that the content of the book that kept being transmitted was actually quite stifling -- the book was not finished yet, and the content had still not been transmitted, which made her feel quite stifled. Then Jane reminded Rob that Seth had obviously obtained his consent -- what consent? Two weeks after completing The Nature of the Psyche, they had thrown themselves into the book The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events. Seth had become so concentrated on the theme of the book that many things had been neglected. At least the interruption in dictation gave them the opportunity to develop in other directions, and these sessions became more flexible.

However, on September 19, 1977 -- in a private session on the evening of September 17 -- Seth brought forth a very exciting concept called Framework 1 and Framework 2. Seth mentioned Framework 1 and Framework 2, and Jane and Rob were so struck by the practical and far-reaching implications of this proposal that they began working together to apply it in daily life.

Simply put, Seth proposed that Framework 2, or what we call inner reality, contains the source of creation. Our world is the world formed by this Framework 2. And through the proper focusing of attention -- our attention, that is, the focus of our consciousness -- we may draw from that vast subjective medium everything needed for a positive, constructive life in Framework 1, that is, in physical reality. Simply put, as long as you project the focus of consciousness onto Framework 2, onto all the probabilities, we can draw very valuable information and material from the physical world -- the life of Framework 1. So Framework 2 and Framework 1 are a very important concept or structure for us.

They had already let Seth know that they hoped he would give a more detailed explanation of the material on Framework 1 and Framework 2 in The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, because those concepts were so closely related to the individual and collective experience surrounding everyone's life.

Now, regarding the exception Rob mentioned at the beginning of his notes — Session 812 on October 1 — at least part of it is related to this book. It was triggered by a recent visit from a reader, who evidently had very strong paranoia. He came to visit Seth, to visit Jane, and then Seth gave him some readings. Because of that contact, Seth gave a session on paranoia, but it was not for that person — it just happened to come up. Although later Jane wrote a letter to that person, and then put that session together with it, for the purpose of including it in a later chapter of this book. So it is not in this chapter.

All right, let us now look at the material Seth transmitted.

Good evening. In order to begin again...

They had stopped for more than twenty weeks, so this session already had a major interruption, and in between there was also Session 812, which dealt with paranoia. Seth said we would talk about paranoia later. He said that when Ruburt was writing one of his books a few days ago, he heard a public service announcement — a public service ad or official notice. The officials told all listeners that the flu season had officially begun.

Every year in the United States there is a flu season, which is winter — autumn and winter, mainly winter. This is still the case today, so every year during flu season people are urged to get flu shots, to get vaccinated. And this announcement seriously warned the elderly and people with certain illnesses to make an appointment immediately to get a flu shot. In America this is called a Flu shot — Flu means influenza, Shot means injection or inoculation — that is, getting a flu vaccine shot. America has been doing this every year up to the present. So when this COVID-19 pandemic first broke out, most Americans treated it as something like a major flu — in their understanding, it was just a relatively serious flu. Because every year they have a historical awareness of the flu, and every year from around Thanksgiving in November through Christmas and New Year, it is the peak flu season, and they all get vaccinated. So when the COVID-19 pandemic broke out last year, most Americans did not take it seriously enough.

The officials mentioned in passing that there was indeed no direct evidence linking past flu inoculations with the fact that some people who had been inoculated happened to contract a rather strange illness. Later Seth will tell you what kind of illness it was — some people who had received flu vaccines in the past got strange illnesses. But there was no direct evidence saying that it was precisely because of the flu vaccine that they got the illness. There was no direct evidence, but there was indirect evidence, and that is what makes it troublesome.

On the whole this was a most interesting announcement, and its implications spanned biology, religion, and economics. So this session focuses on why the very act of telling everyone to get flu shots encompasses these three aspects: biological, religious, and economic.

"The flu season," in a certain way, is an example of a psychologically manufactured pattern — sometimes an artificially created epidemic. Behind this kind of announcement stands the authority of the medical establishment. It is always medical experts who come out and tell you that this year the flu is expected to be widespread, what the climate will be like this year, what Arctic cold fronts, what reasons, and that the elderly, the frail, or people who frequently come into contact with others should get vaccinated. And our communication systems themselves — the media, newspapers, radio, television — these authoritative institutions themselves imply authority. These media themselves carry a certain authority that you cannot question. It is very hard to question the voice coming from a radio or the voice coming from a television, because why? It is intangible, and it must be right. Many people say, "They said it on TV" — whatever is said on TV seems to be right, whatever a television station says must be right. This is a kind of blind obedience to the authority of television and the media, and it is a characteristic of human society as a whole.

Once again, the elderly were singled out. Why? The elderly are the key target group for vaccination. People always feel that the elderly seem to be more susceptible to illness — in the face of any disease, the elderly are very likely to get sick, and this was also true of this COVID-19 pandemic: those who became seriously ill were on average the elderly. This tendency toward illness, he said, is medically regarded as a fact of life.

Yet it is a fact that has no basic foundation in human physiological reality. In our human society, it is indeed a fact that the elderly are prone to illness, but this fact has no foundation in physiological reality. What does it mean to have no foundation in physiological reality? The elderly are just as healthy as young people; they should not be more prone to illness than people of other age groups. But we give them such suggestions — people throughout society give them such suggestions, all saying that the elderly are more prone to illness, more prone to the flu — and so they really do become more prone to illness. This is a fact that has no foundation in physiological reality, but in life it is indeed a fact — a fact brought about through suggestion.

Yet the doctors see physically quite definite results. Doctors say the elderly are prone to the flu, and this is a quite definite result, calculated according to certain proportions and statistics. And then those results are used again as evidence. Doctors say that according to statistical results, the probability of the elderly getting sick is such and such, and the probability of young people getting sick is such and such — including in this COVID-19 pandemic, what the mortality rate is for the elderly, what it is for young people, what the infection rate is — and in this way they tell you that the elderly really are susceptible. And once such suggestions and psychological suggestions emerge, once a consensus forms throughout society, it really does become a phenomenon. When the elderly really do become prone to illness and it becomes a real fact, then scientists will use it again as evidence: see, we were right, the elderly really are prone to illness. So by now we can no longer distinguish whether the elderly really are prone to illness, or whether these medical scientists and society as a whole have given the elderly suggestions that make them more prone to illness.

Even today there are some isolated regions in the world — some areas isolated from our traditional civilization and traditional society, such as remote areas, remote tribes, including some backward areas in Africa and South America, where there is not such frequent contact with the civilized world — in those places, the elderly are not the ones who produce illness. In some fairly primitive tribes, the elderly are just as healthy, their probability of getting sick is no higher than that of young people, their vital signs do not weaken, and they maintain quite good health all the way until death.

For example, China has many longevity villages, longevity townships — Bama in Guangxi is a longevity township¹⁷. Bama lies deep within towering mountains surrounded on three sides, and the altitude, humidity, and climate are all very good. But the core factor is that they have very little contact with the outside environment. It cannot be said that they are completely cut off from the world, but they are relatively isolated. Their food is very simple and monotonous, mostly corn as the staple. In such a region where nutrition is not adequate, their longevity is nevertheless universally recognized, and the proportion of centenarians is extremely high.

Why? Seth gives the reason — precisely because they are isolated. Many people go exploring, thinking, ah, is it because the climate in Bama is better, the environment is better? They look for these external material causes, and rarely analyze this reason: because they have not been influenced by the psychological suggestions of traditional society. They have no internet, no television so widespread, no media bombarding them relentlessly, so they are simply not affected by modern society, and their elderly are very healthy.

Let me tell a joke, told by the locals. They said the local township government was cracking down on gambling — because the local people liked to gamble. Once, the anti-gambling officers went to catch gamblers, and at the entrance to the village they saw an old man at the village entrance, seemingly sunbathing, but actually he was acting as a lookout. As soon as he saw the village cadres and township cadres coming, the old man took off running. The young cadres behind chased him with all their might, but they could not catch up. They followed the old man all the way to a large courtyard, where they found everyone playing mahjong or the kind of self-entertainment gambling common in rural areas. The cadres who caught up were out of breath and asked the old man: why are you running? At your age, why are you running? When they asked how old the old man was — 108 years old. A 108-year-old man ran, and the young cadres behind could not catch up. Then they asked what was going on, and the old man said that all the mahjong players were his uncles and aunts, all one generation older than him, and he was of the nephew generation, so they sent this young man out to stand watch, because he was not qualified to sit at the table at all. The people sitting there playing mahjong were all 118 or 120. Of course this is a joke, but it reflects that the local elderly are extremely healthy — not wheezing and sickly, living to over a hundred in a state of illness, but all very healthy.

You must admit that their belief systems are quite practical. What does "quite practical" mean? They only see the problem right in front of them, and are not influenced by those possible preventive illnesses, not influenced by beliefs about illnesses that have not actually occurred. They are also not surrounded by medical people — there are no medical people at all; it is a place lacking doctors and medicine. And those relatively isolated regions are all medically backward, yet their elderly are all very long-lived, rather than being better off as we imagine in big cities with hospitals everywhere. Later in this book we will return to this theme and discuss it further.

The worst off in this regard are the urban-rural fringe areas. They are influenced by modern culture and the media, and they believe in medicine; but they also believe that the medical conditions where they are are not good, and believe that good medical care is all in the big cities, and they do not have those resources. They both believe that modern medicine is the solution to many problems, and are also influenced and suggested by the media's relentless bombardment, while at the same time believing that they do not have such resources at hand, so their rate of illness is actually quite high. In terms of average life expectancy, they are actually not as high as people in big cities. Although people in big cities have all kinds of negative influences, they have one kind of confidence — they feel that they are close to medical resources, close to authoritative medical institutions, and this intangible confidence actually enhances their longevity. And the truly remote, isolated, unaffected places are actually the places with the longest life spans.

But here, we have what can almost be called a kind of social program that promotes illness — as if we were promoting a social program of illness. Influenza is the one thing that humanity alone has created. Originally, only a certain proportion of people got colds, but in order to prevent colds, under the instigation of medical or economic interests, we turn the flu into a social phenomenon. So influenza is something created by humanity; it is a kind of collective meditation.

Behind the scenes there is an economic structure — do not overlook this; behind it there is an economic structure. It involves the foundations of science and medicine, but it goes beyond that. These technology magnates, pharmaceutical magnates, vaccine manufacturers, and everyone from the largest drug companies to the smallest pharmacies are involved, from supermarkets to the corner grocery store, in economic considerations, involving all of these factors. In America, flu shots can basically be done at the pharmacies and drugstores inside supermarkets, and it is very widespread. The vaccine is also made very simple — just one injection. But this involves enormous interests — you might say, how much money can a flu vaccine be worth? In America, flu shots are not expensive, and they are often advertised like merchandise: 29.90, 19.90, 39.90 for one shot. Many people think it is not expensive anyway, so while shopping at the supermarket they just get a shot on the way. From the big pharmaceutical companies to the small distributors, to the final supermarkets and convenience stores, all are in this chain of interests. Do not think that each one does not earn much — but the number of people is huge. Every year tens of millions of people get the shot, and if you multiply that by a few dozen dollars, you know how big a market this is.

Session 814

Suppose that pills, potions, and injections to combat colds and influenza were prominently displayed...

During that time of year, when you went to the supermarket, it was full of pills and potions related to colds and influenza. It also served to remind those who might have missed the announcements of the coming difficulties -- you might not have watched TV, might not have been influenced, but you could not avoid going to the supermarket, could not avoid going shopping. Basically, any place around you would remind you, remind you that flu season had arrived, buy some medicine to have on hand -- just in case? Get a shot -- just in case getting infected would be such a hassle.

Then TV commercials brought yet another barrage. Seth said in a humorous tone that you could go from hay fever season to influenza season without ever lacking any personal medicine. Hay fever season is spring and summer -- that is another kind of epidemic. What he meant was that you humans artificially create all sorts of epidemics for every season, and then start scaring the public into buying medicine and getting vaccinated.

A cough in June might be laughed off and quickly forgotten.

But during flu season it was different -- a single cough could become suspicious. Could it be a cold? And under such circumstances, especially during a week when a person was having a rough time, a person might think: after all, who wants to go out tomorrow? There was a suggestion in his mind -- who wants to go out tomorrow? Who wants to go to work? Say this week had been very rough, and then he coughed and caught a cold. It might originally have been just a mild cough, but then he suggested to himself that he might be coming down with something. A cold would mean he did not have to go to work -- because with the flu you cannot go to work, you cannot go to school, you would infect others. So if you got the flu and asked for leave, even if you did not ask, people would send you home.

For those who did not want to go to work, getting the flu might mean that deep down they really did want to rest for a few days. Of course, they themselves would not feel that way, would not be conscious of it. Because getting the flu is genuinely miserable -- here we must make a distinction: the flu and the common cold are not the same. The symptoms of the flu are still quite severe, much more severe than the common cold. You might really expect to fall ill; you might have such an expectation. It could serve as an excuse for not facing many problems -- because you fell ill, it became your excuse.

There are many people who are almost consciously aware of what they are doing.

Some people can be aware that they might want to get sick, and all they need to do is pay attention to the suggestions so loudly put forward by society. As long as society makes a big show of announcing that flu season has arrived, they only need to pay attention -- pay attention -- to that, and their body temperature really does rise, and they really do develop a fever. The concern makes their throat go dry, and then the latent virus -- which up to that point, before they got sick, had not yet caused them any harm -- is really activated. This flu virus may exist in everyone, and during flu season it may be present in the air, but it has not been activated. Yet because of all these reasons -- social suggestion, self-psychological suggestion, and so on -- the virus becomes activated in your body, and you really do get the flu.

The manufacturers who made clothing, gloves, and leather boots were also vigorously promoting their goods.

However, in these industries, at least their ideas were relatively healthy, because their advertisements often emphasized activities beneficial to physical and mental health. Those selling clothes, leather boots, and gloves were telling you -- hey, if you want to go skiing, go traveling, go out and have fun, you need to dress warmly. So these all depicted happy skiers, or people hiking in winter forests, all very healthy people. But sometimes they would also imply that their products would protect you from colds and influenza, and guard against your inherent weakness -- sometimes there were such advertisements, but mostly not. You see, advertisements for down jackets are usually filmed very beautifully -- going skiing, going on vacation, traveling in winter -- rarely do they say that if you wear this you will not get sick, though some people, some manufacturers, do make such advertisements.

On the whole, the inoculation itself had little benefit -- that is, the flu vaccine -- and it might even carry potential dangers. Especially when it was used to prevent an epidemic that had not actually occurred yet. What Seth opposed was your mentality of preventing such epidemics -- when the danger had not yet arrived, you preemptively vaccinated against it, and that should not be done. They might have some specific effect -- they really might be effective -- but on the whole, generally speaking, they were disadvantageous. But for the individual, perhaps it was beneficial for you. From the overall perspective, it disturbed a function of the body and triggered other physiological reactions that might not have manifested for some time. If you did not get this vaccine, these physiological reactions would not occur. For example, viruses like measles, smallpox, and tuberculosis -- some of them have already been eradicated in nature, and you can hardly encounter them now, and your body would not react to them. But when you get these vaccines, the body reacts to symptoms similar to those diseases in order to produce antibodies, and these reactions are physiological responses that you might not have had for a very long time.

Then influenza coincided with Christmas -- flu season definitely overlapped with Christmas, both in winter. And when Christians were told they should be happy -- Christians were certainly told to be happy at Christmas. What is Christmas for? To be happy! And to wish their fellow human beings well -- Christians all said Merry Christmas to each other, blessing each other every day. At least in thought they were blessing -- he used a very interesting expression here. What did he mean? In action there was not much blessing either; it was all just words. Sometimes the things Seth said were quite cutting.

Happily returning to the natural wonder of childhood -- celebrating Christmas was like returning to childhood, putting up a Christmas tree, stringing colored lights on it, hanging gifts on it, then giving each other presents, and hiding children's gifts in stockings, and pretending there was a Santa Claus. There were also many volunteers dressed as Santa Claus, going door to door delivering gifts in some communities. They were also told to pay homage to God -- at Christmas, we should all pay homage to God and thank God.

Yet the Christian spirit had been reduced to a tangled, pitiful story. Originally the Christian spirit was very unified and very great, but its coherence had largely disappeared. Why had it disappeared? It separated man from God, set them in opposition. Such a religion became isolated from daily life, became irrelevant to our lives. Because many people could not integrate their beliefs with the various areas they felt -- within their belief system, what they felt in their lives was different, was contradictory, so they could not turn it into a consistent, unified thing.

And at Christmas, they partially recognized the gulf that existed between their scientific beliefs and their religious beliefs. They found themselves unable to cope with such a spiritual and psychological dilemma.

The result is often a kind of psychological and spiritual depression, which is deepened by the Christmas music or commercial displays... and by the religious reminder that man is made in the image of God, and the other reminder that such a gifted body seems unable to take care of itself, but is a natural prey to disease and disaster.

What he said in this passage was very convoluted. To put it simply: Christians at Christmas time happened to coincide with flu season. During flu season, you were told that if you did not get vaccinated you would easily get the flu, easily get sick. It told you that -- you are both a child of God, made in the image of God, as the Bible says. If you are made in the image of God, then originally you are a child of God, so how could your body be so fragile that if you did not take good care of it, it would fall ill? Should not the body God made for us be a healthy, vibrant life? Why would it become so weak, as if without careful attention the body would fall ill at any moment? At this time, in such a festive season as Christmas, when we were all as happy, blessed, and relaxed as children, we were constantly reminded to consider whether we should get a flu shot, whether we should guard against influenza.

He offered an interpretation of the overlapping of flu season and Christmas. Another reason why influenza spread among humans: in Christian countries, during this season, people were caught in a spiritual dilemma -- on the one hand believing they were children of God, on the other hand discovering that the body of this child of God was not so great after all, so fragile that a little cold would not do, a little heat would not do, so easily turned into prey by disease or disaster.

The Christmas season, therefore, carries in your society a personal hope, while the flu season reflects his fear.

When flu season and Christmas season overlapped, it reflected both a person's hope and a person's fear, and revealed the gulf between the two. Christmas was a happy, joyful day, and at the same time it told you that you could easily get sick.

The doctor is also an individual, so I am speaking only of his profession.

The doctor himself is also an ordinary person, but because his profession is medicine, Seth said that today when speaking of the doctor he was referring to the profession, not to the individual.

He usually does the best he can within the belief system he shares with his fellow human beings.

Doctors all received this modern medical education -- went to medical school, did internships, became residents, and then became practicing physicians. They all shared a belief system with their peers, all believing in the modern medical system. This belief did not exist in isolation either; it was part of a vast modern medical system. Of course it was entangled with religious and scientific beliefs -- although it might seem completely unrelated. Many people say that is nonsense, what does medicine have to do with religion? Because doctors are people, and people have religious beliefs, and people are influenced by these religious and cultural factors. So doctors are also influenced by religion.

The Christian tradition held that illness was God's punishment, or a trial given by God, to be endured calmly. According to Christian doctrine, illness was God's punishment upon people. Other religions also had this -- in Buddhism, you get sick because you have karma, you have not cleared your karma, you need to clear your karma, release animals, do good deeds. There was karma from past lives, karma from this life, karma every day. Christianity and Buddhism were quite similar in this respect -- you get sick because you did not do good deeds, you did bad deeds, or you were born carrying such karma. Some people say I have done nothing bad in this life -- right, you have not done bad things in this life, but you did in your previous life. Then that person is quite pitiful; how do I resolve what happened in my previous life? There is no way; you were born carrying this karma, born with this original sin.

And it also regarded man as a sinful creature, stained by original sin, forced to wash away his sins through the labor of blood and sweat...

Since you were born with sin, you are your punishment, so you must endure it. Just as someone sentenced to three years in prison must serve those three years; that is what you must endure.

So the doctor was caught in a dilemma: should I treat him or not? If this illness was God's punishment for him, then if I cure him, am I not going against God's will? But if I do not treat him, then I am violating my professional ethics and professional integrity as a doctor -- doctors have their oath, in China and abroad. He would be violating his medical oath, so what should he do? He was in great anguish.

Science has regarded man as an accidental product of a universe that does not care about you...

Science tells you the universe does not care about you. The universe is lifeless. You have life, you have emotions, you can write poems every day expressing your feelings toward the universe, toward heaven and earth, toward mountains, rivers, lakes, and seas, but the universe has no feelings for you. From the scientist's perspective, the universe is a cold, emotionless, lifeless thing. Then how could a lifeless thing give birth to a living person? He cannot explain it clearly either. He says it was an accident. Then why is there no life in some places? In most places -- as far as the eye can see and probes have reached, no planet with life has been found other than Earth. Although theoretically it seems possible, none has been seen. So Earth is an accident, and life on Earth is also an accident, not a universal phenomenon. Why do Mars and so many planets, including those beyond the solar system, show no signs of life in the places probes can detect? Of course it is known -- it is very simple: current scientific exploration analyzes those planets, their temperatures, their environments are all thoroughly understood, and through spectral analysis the chemical elements and composition of those planets are very clear. If a planet does not even have basic carbon-based compounds, then it cannot have a biological form like the one on our Earth. Perhaps other forms exist. If no living beings exist there, then at least they would emit some artificial signals -- for example, we humans are constantly emitting radio signals -- they would emit them too. We have so many telescopes in space, so many detectors monitoring signals from every corner of the universe, and to this day we have still not detected any extraterrestrial signals, let alone radio signals as precise, complex, and regular as those of us humans. Not a single one.

So science tells you that we humans, this solar system, this Earth, are all a series of accidents within accidents within accidents -- each accident having a probability of ten to some power, and then these accidents connected together, and finally the birth of humanity occurred.

He really was a creature without a meaningful center, in whom consciousness was merely the result of the operation of a physical mechanism that happened to come into existence, and outside the physical structure, consciousness had no reality.

From the scientist's perspective, he cannot find the meaning of life. Scientists cannot answer this question, and they do not answer it either; they throw it all to the philosophers to answer. And the questions philosophers answer, scientists scoff at: you are a philosopher, you can say whatever you want, I do not care at all what you say, because you are not scientific. You say it is invisible, you explain it -- he says I do not answer, I do not answer questions about the meaning of life; that is not a question scientists should answer. Is that not a dead end? He himself does not answer, and when others answer, he does not acknowledge it.

So in the view of modern science, life has no meaning whatsoever. Including every one of our children -- he also considers them accidents. When male and female conceive, there are hundreds of millions of sperm; whichever one combines with the egg seems random, accidental, not necessarily any particular one. Everything is an accident. Since everything is an accident, then it has no meaning in itself -- what meaning does an accident have? What meaning does an accidental event have? No meaning.

Where does consciousness come from? Scientists believe consciousness is a product of the brain; consciousness comes from the brain, and outside the physical structure, consciousness has no reality. Consciousness can only exist within the structure of the human body -- the brain; without the physical body, consciousness does not exist.

Science is consistent in that regard...

Scientists are absolutely consistent in this regard; they will round it out very well themselves, and it is very hard to challenge them; they will have a whole set of theories waiting for you.

Yet Christian doctrine officially demands the joy of the children of sorrow.

What is meant by children of sorrow? You humans are sinful, born into sorrow. For example, if you are sentenced to ten years in prison, are you not sorrowful? Who would not be sorrowful after being sentenced? Let alone being born with original sin, and this original sin is lifelong, permanent, until the day of the final judgment, the day the world is destroyed, when it can be washed away -- to heaven or to hell, with a fifty-fifty probability. So he referred to such Christian believers as children of sorrow.

But Christianity demanded that the children of sorrow be joyful -- you must be happy. Especially during the Christmas season, you must be happy and joyful, thanking heaven, thanking earth, thanking all things. A sinful person, a person born sinful, what does he have to be thankful for? Is he thankful that he was born sinful? Thankful that God, the moment he was created, placed a cross of original sin on his back? I do not understand. So Seth's meaning was also to mock them.

Sinners were required to find a childlike purity...

Christians believe humans are born sinful, and these sinners are required to be as pure as children. Is that not a ridiculous paradox? You say people are born with original sin, yet you require them to be as pure as children; then how could someone as pure as a child have sin? I do not know how they manage to make it self-consistent. Of course, most religions, the vast majority of religions, do not allow you to challenge them. You say let us discuss this issue -- politely they will not discuss it with you, and impolitely they will just scold you away; they do not allow you to discuss it, do not allow you to challenge it.

They were required to love a God who would one day destroy the world, and who would cast them into hell if they did not honor him.

Christianity asks people to love this God -- what kind of God is this? One who will ultimately destroy this world, that is, the final judgment. At the end of the world, God will come out to judge, calling out all the people of all generations, scoring them one by one: you go to heaven, you go to hell. And the great judgment will only come on the day the world is destroyed. So this doomsday theory is very marketable in Christian society; they are all waiting for this doomsday to come -- because only when doomsday comes can they go to heaven, and most people believe they can go to heaven, so they keep hoping for this doomsday to arrive. Is that not a very twisted belief? Hoping every day for the destruction of the world, because when it is destroyed they can go to heaven. We will not interpret this further; everyone can think about the meaning of this for themselves.

You still have to listen to him -- Christianity teaches that those who believe in me shall have eternal life; if you do not believe in me, you will not have eternal life, and you will go to hell. So you must believe in him and honor him.

Many people are caught between such contradictory beliefs...

If you are not a Christian, and you step outside the Christian perspective to look -- of course many people are devout Christians -- if you can step outside your own perspective and look at his beliefs, you will find the contradictions within them.

Especially during the Christmas season, they fall victim to illness.

Many people who get the flu are Christians. In any city, churches and hospitals are often the largest buildings. In typical American residential areas, the largest buildings you see are generally churches and hospitals. The government is not large -- in America, apart from state legislatures and state governments, ordinary city governments are very small, tiny city halls. But churches are not like that; churches are generally very large and imposing. Hospitals are the same; although American hospitals are somewhat different from those in China, even so they are very large, often with a dozen, dozens, or even hundreds of buildings connected into a vast complex. Like the MD Anderson Cancer Center in Houston¹⁸, or the Mayo Clinic in Rochester¹⁹, you can see they are very large.

Churches and hospitals were also the only buildings that did not need to rely on city ordinances to remain open on Sundays.

In traditional American seasons, commercial activities were closed on Sundays or Saturdays; many opened for half a day on Saturday, and Sunday was definitely a day of rest. To this day, there is a fried chicken fast food chain in America that still closes on Sundays -- very interesting; a fast food restaurant still takes one day off every week, carrying on that tradition.

You cannot separate your private value system from your health.

Churches and hospitals, these buildings were all very large, and they were all open on Sundays. In America, banks are closed on Sundays, and on Saturdays they generally open until noon; many banks do not open on Saturdays at all. But churches and hospitals were different; not only were they grand in scale, but they remained open even on traditional days of rest. This was indeed a very special phenomenon.

Seth made a very clever satire here. He said churches and hospitals were equally large, and both opened on Sundays. Churches instilled guilt in their congregants, filling their hearts with contradiction and struggle, and this psychological state made people susceptible to illness; and when people fell ill, the hospitals profited from it.

You cannot separate your private value system from your health.

That is to say, your personal value system -- your worldview, your belief system, your values -- and your health are very difficult to separate.

The Sense of Wholeness in Religion and the Human Religious Sentiment

Seth continues:

What I am speaking of now are those that are interwoven with social life and community life.

These religions are all interwoven with humanity's general social life and community activities. To such an extent that the sense of wholeness in all basic religions has already disappeared entirely. Many religions were sound when they were first established, but because of propaganda such as church doctrine, this sense of wholeness disappeared. The mentality it gives people is twisted, not sound.

However, human nature itself inherently possesses a religious sentiment. This point may not be easy for those of us living in mainland China to understand. Because everyone around us is a person without religious belief, so it is easy to assume that having no religious belief is a universal world phenomenon. Actually, it is not. Once you leave this environment, you will find that having religious belief is actually the more common phenomenon, and people without religious belief are actually the minority. If you travel around the world and ask what the proportion is between people with religious belief and those without, you will know.

Seth says that human nature inherently possesses a religious sentiment; this is a basic attribute. So many people do not understand why those cult organizations or various religions can develop so easily. Because they seize upon one of the most basic attributes of human nature -- people are born with a religious disposition. If you seize upon this characteristic of human nature and use it to deceive and promote, as long as you put forward a set of theories that is simple and self-consistent, make it mysterious, and add a bit of authority, then no matter what you preach, there will be a group of followers.

So sometimes when you step back and look at it, it seems that people who believe in certain religions seem to lack the capacity for critical thinking, and even many highly educated people are the same when it comes to religious matters, not to mention some primitive tribes. Many people do not understand why, with such high human intelligence, people can become so deeply lost in a religious theoretical system that cannot even be self-consistent, and no one can pull them out.

Seth explains that this is because it is a basic attribute of human beings, something of human nature, the part of the psyche that is most often overlooked. Many people do not know that they have a religious disposition; when they are deceived by others and join certain organizations, they enter in a muddled way.

You have a natural religious knowledge that you are born with and that is inherent.

Strange, isn't it? You are born with some religious knowledge.

William James's Posthumous Journal

Ruburt explains this feeling very well in the book The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher: The World View of William James²⁰. This book is highly recommended; from it you can understand American society. William James was an American philosopher²¹. After he died, people actually connected with his post-death consciousness, and from the perspective after death he reviewed the thinking he had done during his life and wrote some journals.

In that book, Ruburt explains very well this natural religious knowledge that people are born with. He says:

It is a biological spirituality that has been translated into words.

This sentence is very interesting. First of all, it is a spirituality, a spirituality that every person possesses; but it is also biological, because we human beings exist in a biological way. Spirituality has many levels; there are biological ones and non-biological ones; there are those with human attributes and those with non-human attributes. The scope of spirituality is very broad.

This is also why I have always insisted on calling that Seth book "The Nature of the Psyche," rather than the Taiwanese translation "The Nature of the Mind." Because as soon as you talk about the mind, it implies that there is a "mind," and if there is a "mind," there is a person, and it takes on human attributes. But true spirituality transcends human existence, and what is expressed at the level of the mind or the human level is only a part of it. The "spirit" in what we often call "body, mind, and spirit" refers precisely to a manifestation of spirituality on the biological level.

James says one sentence in this book:

Life is a gift, not a curse.

This is a rebuttal against the Christian notion of being "born with original sin." If life is a gift, then that curse is broken.

I am a unique and worthy creature in the natural world.

Nature surrounds us at all times and in all places, nourishing us, reminding us of the greater source from which we ourselves and the world come. So we are not cursed; we are nourished and graced.

Our bodies fit pleasantly into their environment, and again, come from that unknown source.

The environment is inherently gracious and nourishing to you; you are naturally born with a sense of pleasure. How could there be that sense of guilt from being "born sinful"?

This source reveals itself only through the physical world, through all worlds.

That source is formless and shapeless; it can only let us see its manifestation through all things in the world. We and all things come from the same source, and we are all its manifestations. Since that is so, where does original sin come from, where does the curse come from, where does punishment come from, where does the distinction between going to hell and going to heaven come from? Every one of you is living in heaven, and you are in heaven right now, in this very moment. If you have not realized that you are still in heaven, that is only because you yourself have not realized it.

This feeling of being graced and nourished by all things brings the body optimism, joy, and an endless supply of energy for growth. It encourages your curiosity and creativity, placing you simultaneously in a psychic world and a natural world. We human beings exist in these two worlds at the same time—one is the physical world that we can perceive, and the other is the psychic world that we cannot touch or see.

The Limitations of Organized Religion

Seth continued:

Organized religions have always attempted to redefine that kind of feeling in cultural terms.

The biggest problem here is that this is originally something very natural, something innate — this biological soundness and psychological soundness is inherently complete — yet religion insists on explaining it with cultural things, using humanistic things to depict the things of nature. And they rarely succeed.

Why can't they depict it? Because once it involves cultural and humanistic things, it becomes too narrow and too dogmatic. Nature originally has none of these words, and none of these religions. Nature is nature, the universe is the universe. But suddenly a religion pops up and says, this world must operate according to the way my religion prescribes, and my religion's god is the only god — yet the words spoken by this god, when expressed in writing, don't they carry strong cultural and social attributes? This has already deviated from nature.

Nature would say: what language does this religion actually use? Hebrew, English, Sanskrit, Hindi, Tibetan, or Chinese? How do you define it? It originally comes from nature, from the source of the universe, yet you insist on describing it with humanistic and cultural things, and you can't even describe it clearly.

And the cultural structure finally outweighed the finer components within it.

The cultural structure is too crude, because it is something thought up by human beings. You want to use a very crude cognition to depict something of nature that is very rich and fine — you simply cannot depict it.

Let me give a simple example: describe for me what the fragrance of an apple is, but you cannot use the concept of "apple" to answer. You'd have to substitute other words, right? You'd say it resembles a certain kind of fragrance — if you remove all analogies, can you describe the fragrance of an apple in words? If you can't even depict something this simple, how can you depict nature's grace toward you? How can you depict the sacred unity and wholeness of our coming from the same source?

The linguistic structure of culture is very crude, like a paintbrush as thick as a mop, and you insist on using it to depict a world as fine as an atom — it can't be done. But if you insist on forcibly depicting it, you can only say: "I am merely forcing a depiction of a certain mood, a certain meaning — you go and understand it yourselves." But religion doesn't say that. It tells you: "This thing I have forcibly depicted is the truth of the world, and you may not question it in any way. None of your finer, more personal, richer feelings matter — you must conform to my coarse, simple, crude cultural structure or religious structure."

Isn't this a joke? You use a humanistic, rough, low-level language to depict a very high-level state of nature. The subtle parts of each of our inner psychological, psychic, and spiritual dimensions cannot be described by language, by culture, or by anything created by human beings, yet it still forces you to accept it — that is the problem.

So Seth has always said Buddhism is relatively better, because in its later stages Buddhism made this point very clearly: "I have said nothing; I have merely pointed you in a direction — the specifics you must realize and verify for yourselves." The more tolerant a religion is, the closer it comes to expressing those inner truths. To judge whether a religion is closer to the truth, look at only one thing: whether it is inclusive enough. Any religion that is not inclusive is farther from the truth; and a religion that is truly close to the truth is very inclusive, formless and shapeless.

Soundness Is the Heritage of Humanity

However, the individual possesses a private biological and psychic soundness, which is also part of humanity's heritage.

Every person is sound both psychically and biologically, and this is also humanity's heritage, just as people are born with a religious nature. This is also the right of any living being, not only human beings; any other living being also has this biological and psychological soundness.

A person cannot distrust his own nature while at the same time trusting the essence of God.

There is no way to trust both of these at the same time. Because God is the word people use for the source of their existence, and if his existence is contaminated, then his God must be so as well. You cannot say, "I do not trust my own nature, but I trust God" -- that is impossible. Because human beings and God come from the same place. If human existence is sinful and contaminated, does that mean God is also contaminated? A God without original sin -- why would he create a bunch of people with original sin? God says, "I made human beings in my image," so if the human beings he made all have original sin, does God also have original sin?

So you cannot tell a person, "Do not trust your own nature, just trust God" -- that splits the person apart.

Your private beliefs become mixed with the beliefs of others, and form the reality of your culture.

Our cultural reality is formed by the interweaving and mixing of individual beliefs with the beliefs of others.

Therefore the distorted concepts of the medical profession and scientists, or of any other group, are not imposed upon you; rather, they are the result of your group beliefs, existing in isolation within various different fields of learning.

Although the concepts of these groups are distorted, these distortions are not imposed upon you; you are also one of the participants. In other words, you are also manufacturing those distorted concepts of the medical profession, the scientists, or the religious world, and you have a part in it. So do not push it all onto other people, always thinking, "There are always villains who want to harm me," feeling that you are innocent.

When you acknowledge that you have a part in it, then you can change it. When you change, you will influence the people around you; when everyone changes, does that not change the whole society, the whole world? If you push it outside and say, "This is not my responsibility, I am the victim," then since they are harming you and it is beyond your ability to control, you cannot change it either, and you can only wait for some chosen one to come and sweep away the dark forces for you. That is being irresponsible and shirking responsibility. Why can you not stand up and take the responsibility you ought to take?

The Doctor's Dilemma and the Problem of Preventive Medicine

Seth gives an example:

Doctors are very often extremely unhealthy.

Doctors are not the longest-lived group in this society. Why? Because they are in hospitals every day, burdened with those specific health beliefs. To treat you, they must firmly believe in the beliefs of modern medicine. Yet these beliefs themselves are distorted -- modern medicine holds that human beings are inherently fragile, easily affected by various infectious diseases, viruses, and genetic factors.

Moreover, their attention is focused on illness. A person not in the medical system might go a whole lifetime without coming into contact with more than a few sick people, but doctors are immersed in it every day, appearing in case records as primary participants or even attending physicians, constantly seeing people die from illness. Their attention is necessarily drawn into these matters, so they are more prone to illness than those who are not drawn in. Because wherever attention goes, that is what happens.

The concept of prevention, then, is always based upon fear.

If you prevent something, it must be because you are afraid it will happen. No one "prevents" winning the lottery, right? You do not prevent pleasant things; what you prevent is surely something you fear, something bad. And the last thing we should want is fear.

Preventive medicine, therefore, often causes the very diseases it hopes to avoid.

The more doctors prevent, the more likely they are to bring about the disease. If you have known some doctors and nurses, you know their fear of viruses exceeds that of ordinary people; they wash their hands many times a day. What I have observed (it may not be comprehensive): doctors' children generally tend to be rather thin and frail, not especially healthy. The reason is that the parents worry too much; from early childhood they worry about the child catching this illness or that illness, forcing the child to wash hands several times a day, telling the child that eating this is unhealthy and eating that is dangerous.

This concept of prevention not only continues to foster the entire system of fear.

The more you prevent, the more you spread fear throughout society.

And again, taking specific steps to prevent a body that is not yet ill from becoming ill often causes reactions that bring about the side effects that would occur if the disease had in fact been contracted.

Your body has not yet become ill, yet to prevent it from becoming ill you take certain specific steps -- such as getting vaccinated -- and the injection itself brings a series of side effects. The vaccine may not directly cause you to contract the disease it is meant to prevent, but it can bring about the side effects of that disease.

Certain specific diseases also affect other parts of the body, and those effects have never been studied, or are not even known yet, so such inoculation cannot take those effects into account. Human beings weigh the pros and cons and consider these side effects an acceptable price compared with the loss of contracting the disease itself. But what Seth is saying is that this nonessential, specific disease affects other parts of the body, and as for what kind of effects it produces, we human beings have not yet seriously studied them -- they are not yet known.

There are also situations where mutation occurs after inoculation -- the vaccine mutates within the body, or the side effects of the disease mutate. For a period, some people actually became carriers of that disease and infected others. It might not break out in their own bodies, yet they passed it on to others.

Of course, there are also some people who, whether inoculated or not, rarely get sick; they are not sensitive to or fearful of health matters. So Seth says:

I am not implying that all people react negatively to inoculation. In the most basic terms, however, inoculation has no benefit whatsoever.

He is not implying that vaccination always has adverse consequences, but in the most basic terms, it does not do much good either.

Seth continues:

Though I am well aware that medical history seems to contradict me.

He knows that according to human medical history, the viewpoint of modern medicine is completely opposite to his -- holding that inoculation has enabled human beings to resist various diseases and has eradicated various diseases.

In certain periods, particularly when modern medical science was born, the belief in inoculation was held, if not by the general populace, then by the doctors themselves.

When modern medicine was born, the belief in the effectiveness of inoculation was sincerely held by both ordinary people and doctors. They were not giving you something useless; they genuinely believed the thing was effective, and they genuinely wanted people not to get sick.

It did possess the great power of new suggestion and hope.

Just as when the COVID vaccine was developed, the whole world rejoiced, feeling that humanity had seen hope. Is this suggestion, this hope, useful? Of course it is useful; it is extremely useful in our fight against the novel coronavirus. But what is useful is not the vaccine itself, but the suggestion and the hope.

I am afraid, however, that scientific medicine's achievements have caused as many diseases of the heart as it has cured.

When medicine saves human lives, it is able to do so because:

Of the doctor's own intuitive healing understanding, or because the patient is so deeply impressed by the great efforts made on his behalf that he is indirectly convinced of his own worth.

The education doctors receive from childhood, their professors, the medical authorities, all swear to them with absolute conviction that "treat it this way and the disease will be cured," and they truly believe it, and they have an intuitive understanding of healing. Or another possibility: the patient sees how firmly the doctor believes, sees the enormous financial and material resources society has invested in this -- from surgery to medication to chemotherapy to the endless stream of new drugs and new therapies, all for the purpose of treating disease -- and the patient is deeply moved: surely something created with such wisdom and dedication from humanity must be effective. Thus he is indirectly convinced of the doctor's worth, and the doctor heals him.

Patients Unwilling to Take Responsibility

Doctors are also often directed by many people who are unwilling to take responsibility for their own health, as well as by those who plead for surgeries they do not need.

There are two kinds of people: one kind does not want to take responsibility for their own health, and the other kind does not need surgery but goes and actively asks for it.

Doctors are also visited by those who do not want to be cured.

Some people inwardly do not want to be cured, and they use the doctor and his medical skill as an excuse to keep being sick. They often say, "See, that doctor is really useless. It is not that I am no good; it is that the doctor did not cure me, and that medicine simply does not work." They blame the doctor for the lifestyle they have no intention of changing.

There really are such people—people who like being sick themselves. Sometimes it is conscious, sometimes unconscious. Often it is because his life is not going well, his career is not going well, his work is not going well, or for various emotional reasons, he will manifest an illness, and then instead of looking for the root cause, he blames the doctor, saying, "My headache just never gets cured. What is the reason?"

The doctor, then, is caught between his religious beliefs and his scientific beliefs.

Doctors are also people, and they have religious beliefs. Sometimes religion and science, these two opposing beliefs, conflict with each other. Sometimes they only deepen his feeling—making the doctor feel that if the body is left alone, it will come down with every possible disease.

Value Systems and Group Experience

Again, your value system and your most intimate philosophical judgments are inseparable from the rest of your private and group experience.

Your values and philosophical judgments are tightly bound up with your personal or group experience; they cannot be separated out and discussed on their own.

In America, your tax money goes to promote many medical experiments and preventive medicine.

The state spends a huge amount of tax revenue on this, because people do not trust the good intentions of their own bodies, and so they want to make all sorts of preparations in advance to guard against future bodily problems.

In the same way, your government funds are also used in the defense budget.

America's two biggest expenditures are, one, medical care, and two, military spending.

Because if you do not trust the good intentions of your own body toward you, then you will have great difficulty trusting any good intentions of that kind on the part of your fellow human beings.

If you do not even trust your own body, believing that the body is constantly falling ill and being attacked by nature, then how could you trust that your fellow human beings have good will toward you? If you believe nature is full of hostility toward you, then you will also believe that other people are hostile toward you — except for immediate family and good friends, anyone who has no particular connection to you is hostile toward you. With beliefs like that, how could life possibly go well?

In fact, then, preventive medicine is very similar in cost to preventive defense.

Preventive medicine and the massive military spending undertaken for possible future military conflicts are two very similar examples. Both are expectations of disaster:

In one case, the disaster comes from that familiar body — we feel the body may fall ill, that it may at any moment be attacked by a deadly disease, and that we seem to have no ability to defend ourselves; in the other case, the danger comes from outside — other countries may invade us, exaggerated into something perpetually dangerous, something we must perpetually fight against.

When Seth said this, it was during the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union, when the two superpowers were engaged in a frenzied arms race. Seth pointed out that the arms race was meaningless, but at the time people had already entered a kind of mad stage. Later, in 1989, the Soviet Union collapsed²², and by all logic the military threat should have been lifted — Russia's economy could no longer be compared with what it had been then; the entire GDP of Russia was only equivalent to that of one Chinese city, Shenzhen²³ — but did America's military spending decrease? No. And no one even knew who the imagined enemy was. Under such imaginings, in 2001, 9/11 finally happened. Previously the Soviet Union had been a concrete enemy; now these terrorists were invisible, no one knew where they were hiding, and the defense budget increased even more.

Other countries are the same way, as if only by exerting every possible effort in armaments can they avoid being bullied by others. If you have read the second volume of Conversations with God²⁴, it specifically discusses a vision for the future of human society: humanity cuts all military spending entirely, no country maintains an army, and they only maintain a common, police-like department to handle some simple, minor work of maintaining social order. Large-scale global wars between nations would be eliminated at the root. No one would have the capacity to attack, no one could invade anyone else, and no one could be invaded by anyone else. The money saved from global military spending in this way could allow all of humanity to live happily.

But the current situation is that there are nearly two hundred countries in the world, and every one of them is completely unambiguous about military spending, treating it as one of its major expenditures. Is it necessary? It is not necessary.

The Body Is Not a Battlefield

Illness, you see, must be attacked, fought against, and struck down. Disease must be eliminated, and viruses too must be wiped out. In many ways the body is almost like an unfamiliar battlefield.

Because so many people have so little confidence in the body, they feel that the body is like a battlefield, with viruses and the body's immune system fighting a war inside the body.

But our body is not a battlefield, and the body cannot withstand that kind of rough treatment. Look at the cases where the novel coronavirus actually caused death: apart from respiratory failure caused by the viral infection, many of them were because the body's immune system launched a final counterattack and carried out a desperate life-and-death struggle inside the body, until in the end the body's normal cells could not withstand this appalling war, and the body could not hold up.

Some people, you see, think of themselves as sick people, just as other people might think of themselves as students.

People who regard themselves as sick will take preventive measures against whatever disease is fashionable or in season. They will announce to others: "Oh, I'm just the kind of person who easily gets sick, my health is poor, my resistance is weak, I never escape any cold that comes around." They make this kind of pronouncement about themselves.

Actually, no one needs to be a student. You come into this society to create and to experience; there is nothing you need to learn. You always think, "I need to learn something first, and then I can do such and such." What is it you want to learn?

Those people who are inexplicably hit by the unfortunate side of medicine — these sick people — there is really no need for any of it.

Seth's viewpoint, especially in the field of medicine, is basically the opposite of modern science or mainstream medicine, and they simply do not fit together. But there is no way around it: the angle from which he stands and our viewpoint are very hard to reconcile on many issues.

This session ended at 12:22.

Notes on Frameworks 3 and 4

Finally, Rob added a note after this session, concerning the question of Framework 1 and Framework 2. Two days after Seth first spoke of Framework 1 and Framework 2, fearing that the two of them might misunderstand, Seth made another statement in a separate private session.

Incidentally, for the purposes of our discussion, there is also a Framework 3 and a Framework 4.

Seth said simply that these labels are all for explanatory reasons only; reality is all mixed together—dimensions, realities, spaces are all mixed together. He said Framework 1, Framework 2, Framework 3, Framework 4 are only for the purposes of discussion and explanation.

In the second note, Seth mentioned a symptom of a "paralyzing" kind. This is a reaction that occurs after vaccination, referring to the influenza vaccination program during the 1976 swine flu outbreak in the United States²⁵, which caused this symptom in a very small percentage of people. Influenza is basically a variant of swine flu or avian flu, and this vaccine caused paralytic symptoms in a very small percentage of people.

I have also mentioned an example before: in China, around the 1960s, in the mid-1960s (roughly 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966), a batch of polio vaccine was administered²⁶, but the vaccine failed quality control and had problems, causing many originally healthy children to contract polio instead. Many, many such people. If you know someone who lived through that era, they will tell you about this.

At the same time, the federal government abruptly ended²⁷ this very expensive and controversial vaccination program in December 1976. In May 1977, half a year later, several scientists (some in the government, some not) reached a consensus: those influenza vaccinations triggered the paralytic symptoms, but the reasons why certain individuals developed this reaction were still unclear. That is to say, it was indeed the vaccination that caused this symptom, but as far as individuals were concerned, what kind of person would trigger it and what kind would not, they had not yet figured out.

Neither Jane nor Rob received that vaccination.

That is all of the interpretation for this session.

About ten weeks had passed since the previous session on this book. During this interval, they did not continue with the content of this book; instead, they held 18 other sessions unrelated to this book. As far as the current work progress was concerned, he had already completed the appendix to Volume 2 of The "Unknown" Reality, and Jane's new book The Magical Approach: The Magical Power of Learning and Application had also begun.

He said that while they were busy with these things, a full ten weeks—two and a half months—went by just like that, from the colorful and warm month of October, quickly to November, and then to Thanksgiving. There are many holidays in the United States, and right after that it began to snow, quite a lot of snow, and they had already made preparations for winter. They still held sessions on Monday and Saturday evenings—the original Monday and Wednesday schedule had been changed to this arrangement. Just while waiting for tonight's session to begin, Jane told him that they might be returning to this book. A full two and a half months had passed in between.

Seth came through. First, half-jokingly, he said that Ruburt and Joseph had bought a color television set, so their world was no longer black and white. This was in 1977, when color televisions in the United States had already entered ordinary households²⁸; whereas in our country, ordinary families began to have black-and-white televisions around 1979 or 1980²⁹, and the popularization of color televisions would take a few more years. He had used television as an analogy on many different occasions, and this time he wanted to do so again. The purpose of this analogy was to show how the concrete events of our daily lives are formed, and in what manner; and to try to describe the many methods by which an individual selects the specific events with which he himself will come into personal contact.

What he wanted to focus on was mass events, because this is a book about the individual and mass events. All sorts of things happen in society, so how does each of us choose which ones to experience and which ones not to experience? What is the mechanism operating behind this choosing? That is the question he wanted to explore.

He went on to say: television not only serves in fact as a method of collective mass meditation, but it also presents to you, in great detail, manufactured dreams.

Television as Joint Meditation

What does "television is a method of collective joint meditation" mean? It means that when a program is broadcast on television, and say hundreds of thousands, millions, or even hundreds of millions of people are watching it at the same time, then during this viewing process, these viewers are collectively hypnotized by the program. The program's producers, through their mode of presentation—whether it is a TV drama, a talk show, or a live reality show—will induce a form of collective hypnosis in the viewers, similar to collective meditation. He calls this "joint meditation." What is joint meditation? It is when the thoughts in the minds of all of us viewers are thinking about the same thing at the same time, which is equivalent to what we do in meditation. When we meditate, do we not often focus our thoughts on one point? The state of focusing our thoughts on one point is a joint meditation.

It is not only a joint meditation, but also a jointly manufactured dream, a dream that every viewer shares to some degree. Everyone has a role in it. This dream is not one hundred percent imposed on you by others; most of it is given to you by others, but as each viewer, you also contribute your part within this dream. Interesting, right? Because within this dream, you are not only a viewer, for the viewers are also part of the dreamscape.

And on certain specific occasions, such as a current affairs news segment, a person being interviewed on the street—it might be an ordinary neighborhood woman, normally just a passerby, an ordinary person—yet when she is interviewed, she appears on the television screen, and millions of people see her. At this moment, this woman, who is normally just a viewer, becomes a participant and protagonist in the interview process of this program. So every viewer appears to be merely a viewer, but you are not passive; in many, many instances, you participate in the event, except that sometimes you are the protagonist, and sometimes you are just a viewer.

Framework 1: The World You Concretely Experience

We will make some distinctions here. For example, Framework 1 and Framework 2 -- he coined two terms, using two terms to discuss, to make the discussion clearer. He calls the world you concretely experience Framework 1 -- that is, what we in real life call the real world, the world we concretely experience with the physical body.

For example, in Framework 1, you watch your television programs. You have many channels to choose from, and you have beloved programs, certain stories or actors you love to watch. Some people like to follow the newest dramas, such as the ones currently airing in mainland China, Sunshine Under My Skin, Golden Years, and so on; some people like to follow current-affairs programs, like Legal Report and such. Channels differ from country to country and region to region -- America has programs from American mainstream media, Taiwan has its own programs, like the earlier Kangxi Coming. Everyone has programs and actors they like.

Yet of all these dramas you watch, you have almost no understanding of how they appear on your screen. You know the television station is broadcasting, and you know the television is receiving, but what electromagnetic principles, broadcast wireless transmission, television tuning and decoding, and then screen projection and presentation are involved in between -- all these technical details, you do not know. The production process of the program, you also do not know.

For example, the dating show If You Are the One, which was very popular a few years ago and still is now, and some programs about defending love -- these programs all seem to be reality shows, but do you know how the live set is done? Those female guests, male guests, and one love story after another, often with all kinds of family problems requiring guests to come help resolve and handle -- do you think those stories are real? Are those people involved real? Many people ask: are those actors performing? If you say they are performing, it is especially lifelike; if you say it is real, it seems a little off, and you can see traces of acting in it. Including those dating segments -- are the people in them really dating? Many of the girls do not look like they lack partners, so why would they still be here dating?

Not until one day you yourself have participated in such a dating segment, or a similar reality-show segment, will you know the entire production team's process, from the initial proposal to create such a segment, from the proposal to the television station's approval, project establishment, investment, to the producer, stage manager, director, actors, guests, audience -- this whole production process. You do not know how it was produced. What you see is the final product presented after production is complete. So you neither understand how it is technically transmitted, nor do you understand how the production team made the program.

But here the core idea comes: you are very certain that if you really buy a television set, it will display its function. Whether or not you are familiar with electronics, electromagnetism, radio, you know that as long as you buy a television, turn it on, press the remote-control button, the program appears before you. How it is accomplished in between, you do not need to know at all. You are full of trust in this television set; you know it can display it. Switching from one channel to another, the result is predictable -- you absolutely believe that pressing it will change the channel, and you can watch whichever station you want without doubt. For example, the program on channel nine will not bleed over into channel six.

Even the dramatic actors participating in the performance have only the most delicate conception of the things involved in making their own images appear on the television screen. Their job is to act, and the technical staff take it for granted that the work will be done well. As guests on a reality show or actors in a television program, although they are the actual participants, do they understand how these programs are made? No. They only know how to act: what the script is like, how to deliver the lines, how to express the character's inner activity, body language, and dialogue. But beyond these things, how the plot is arranged, how the content is put together -- especially now when production is tight, many actors do not even know the overall plot of the entire series. For example, for a 40-episode serial, he may only care about a rough outline: am I playing a good person or a bad person, what kind of role am I playing, who are my family and my opposing actors. Then he starts filming.

Filming is not done starting from episode one. After the director and screenwriter finish the script, they divide the whole script by shot or by scene into many, many scenes -- a television drama may have more than 700 scenes in total, and each scene is one play. They film in whatever way is most convenient: for example, if the recent exterior shots need rain, then the rainy exterior scenes are best all filmed in these few days, because when it stops raining and you want to film rainy scenes again, you still have to dispatch fire trucks and prepare sprinkling equipment, which is very troublesome. When filming, they do whatever is convenient for costumes and props, filming all the exterior shots in one go, then moving to the next location to film the exterior shots there, then filming the interior shots -- renting a villa or a set, and filming all the scenes that might occur there in one go as well. Finally, the editor and director re-edit according to the plot and the script. So the actor only knows on the spot which scene number is being filmed today; there is a number, and once the director says action, filming begins. He is clear about what he is performing today. But he is not clear about the production of the entire television drama or the entire program.

Reality shows are the same. He is not sure whether his live performance will be edited into the final broadcast content. Any reality-show program has many camera positions -- in the past maybe a few camera positions, a dozen or so; now it is dozens or over a hundred camera positions. For example, Tencent once did Produce 101, that large-scale reality show where beautiful girls formed groups and teams, with more than 100 guests -- how many cameras must there have been? Many, many cameras at different positions. So as an actor in a reality show, you do not know whether your performance will be edited into the final broadcast overall program; it may be included or not, and you do not know which parts will be included and which will not. But all the actors know that this program is definitely composed of the performances of all the actors together. This actor does not know much more than you do -- he will know some things you do not, such as the plot arrangement and role settings, but that is all.

Somewhere there must be a program director -- here using director to stand in for the production team. The director must look after the production of the entire program: the performance program must be completed on time, and the actors' roles must be assigned. Who plays what -- some play guests, some play audience members, some cry there, some laugh there. The hypothetical director will know which actor is available, whether he has an opening in his schedule; he also has to see whether this actor likes playing this role. Each role has its own characteristics: there are upright roles and villain roles; some actors are suited to playing villains and cannot play positive roles; some people do not want to play villains. You see who is the hero, who is the tough guy, or who is the smiling great lover who always gets the beauty -- in Hollywood blockbusters there is always a handsome man, whether 007 or Superman, and the protagonist is always assigned a beauty each time, and in the end he saves the world and wins the beauty. Generally who is good and who is bad, these are all roles arranged in advance.

Seth says that everyone who has worked in the film and television industry knows these things. In order for you to watch your beloved programs, a great many behind-the-scenes events must occur -- whether technical hardware and software, or the program's production unit, all require a great deal of behind-the-scenes work. You only need to lightly change the channel, and the program is right there, yet all that work behind it is unknown to you. You take all of this for granted: turn on the television, press the button, and the program you like appears. Your job is only to choose. Remember these two words, "choose" -- you just choose which program to watch, and that is all; so many programs and channels are already there.

Of course, many other people are also watching the same program. Every program has some fixed audience, and each person responds to it quite personally. When you watch a program, everyone has their own response. Although you know many people are watching, other people's feelings are only a slight reference for you; you do not care how others feel, only how you yourself feel when watching this program. But from the observer's perspective, we know this program is not performed for you alone; it is performed for many, many people.

Framework 2: The Spiritual Cosmic Studio

Now this next part is key. He says:

Now, let us imagine for a moment that the events in our lives also happen in the same way.

We feel that the events in life seem random and accidental, happening somehow without our knowing why--Buddhists often use the word "impermanence" to describe this. So can we imagine that behind everything that happens in this world, there is a very large cosmic film and television production unit behind the scenes? This unit might be called "Cosmic Film and Television Company," and it rehearses all kinds of dramas, performing them for us every day and showing them to us. Whatever we want to watch, we go and be the audience; of course, you may also be an actor in the drama--most people play extras, but in the drama whose theme is you, you are the lead.

What drama is it? This drama is called "My Life." This drama is filmed with you as the lead. But you are not only acting in this one drama. You also act in many other dramas, such as "Me and My Company," "My Startup Journey," "My Romance with a Domineering CEO"--and there are many, many more dramas waiting for you to act in. Your youthful years, your college days, are all dramas. Just think of it from another angle: suppose in these dramas you played a role, and you participated in all of them--participation matters most, full of energy. Then what is the purpose of your participation? Just to experience and feel. Acting is so interesting, playing different roles, right? For example, in the program "Where Are We Going, Dad?" you play the dad; you can also play in many other programs. I am just giving an example so you have a mental picture: you choose the events that appear on the screen of your experience.

Suppose you do not have a TV screen, but on your body you have a screen called "My Experience." Suppose you have a television set, and this television set is called "My Experience"--that is the brand. Inside this television set there are many channels: family comedies, family sitcoms, inspirational dramas and startup dramas, occasionally some crime dramas--something got stolen--and all kinds of dramas: serious dramas, dark dramas, melodramatic dramas, and some boring dramas, and so on.

You are quite familiar with the events of your own life--of course you are familiar with your own affairs; you are the hero in your drama, you are that King Kong; the villain, or the victim, is also you. In this plot, you might play the bad guy: for example, you are a very harsh boss, or you are a businessman who does not keep his word, all possible; you might play a parent who helps a child with homework and ends up losing his temper, or you can play a very rebellious child, all possible.

But just as before watching a program, you do not know what is happening in the television studio. So before experiencing specific events, you also do not know what is happening in this creative framework of reality--that is, before this event happens, you cannot know where the world is heading or what the thread of its development looks like. Of course you cannot know; when you are watching a TV drama, you cannot know the later content, and if you did know, you would not watch it. And are the things in life like this too? When everything first starts to happen, some outcomes you can guess, and some outcomes you cannot guess at all.

There is something interesting here: you do not know how it will turn out. So let us talk about that vast, unconscious, spiritual and cosmic studio, and let us give it a name: "Framework 2." Remember, this must be unconscious. What does unconscious mean? It means that the rehearsal process he is talking about--in your cosmic film and audio production company, many, many programs are being filmed at the same time, and all of this is done unconsciously. What you see is that the event has already happened, and you are already in the event, but the rehearsing behind it, you do not know about. So we can call this spiritual, cosmic studio Framework 2.

In this book he will try to tell you what is going on behind this screen. This book will tell you, in this cosmic studio, or rather Framework 2, how events happen; it will tell you what principles lie behind these things in your life, and how they come to appear in your life; how it is that you experience these events and not those events.

He says that in this book he will tell you, and then show you, the way to choose your daily specific programs. I will not only tell you how this program is filmed, I will also tell you how this program lineup is intended to be performed, and I will also give you the remote control. In this way, on your personal television set called "My Experience," you can choose the programs you want to watch--that is, you can choose what events you want to experience, what things you want to feel, what things you want to go through. Whether you want to act in a comedy or a tearjerker is entirely up to you.

Why is it entirely up to you? Because before, you were a passive audience member, you could only watch; whatever they performed, you watched. If a tearjerker was on tonight, you could only watch the tearjerker. Now, he gives you the authority of the boss of this film production company. You can go to this film company and be the boss, and you can decide what to film. You say, I do not want to watch tearjerkers; from now on only make comedies--make more films like Stephen Chow's, just make more.

He says I will not only let you know, but also hand this initiative to you, describing how these people choose, including how these people's choices mix together to form a group reality. I will also tell you how these actors come together, how this production crew is put together, how this makeshift troupe is assembled--there are professional actors, amateur actors, extras, bit players, and what kind of role you are in the middle of it, and how they all come together.

The entire second part later in this book discusses the issues of Framework 1 and Framework 2, all about how this cosmic film company makes films, how these actors are recruited, how they perform, and how you watch it. At this point your identity is very peculiar: you are both the boss of a film company and at the same time you are the audience; you are both an actor in it and you are the director; you are also the television station that decides when this drama airs and what it airs. There may be both comedies and tearjerkers--should the tearjerker be shown first, bitterness before sweetness, or sweetness before bitterness? Any of it can be arranged, and the arrangement is also up to you.

At this point he uses this method to let you switch among different roles, so that you can experience how this entire world stage play is performed. This is what fits the theme of this book: what individual and mass events really are, and their nature. He has, so to speak, made a preview--you see, he is also like making a movie, first showing a trailer for himself, telling you what is coming next. Everybody fasten your seatbelts, the feature presentation is about to begin.

Session 815

Television Is an Undistorted Mirror

He says:

For now we will return to the question of television. You can turn off a program you dislike.

When you do not want to watch a program, you turn it off and change the channel. But you might say, when there is something in real life I do not want to experience, can I change the channel? Of course you can change the channel, only you think you cannot. You can also choose whether or not to watch a television drama that everyone praises.

Television gives you a mirror of your society, and in thousands upon thousands of homes its light answers light.

This "light answers light" describes the flickering glow of the screens. Every household at night -- now fewer people watch television than before, everyone looks at phones and iPads -- but before, basically when evening came, the television in every family's living room was glowing. This light answering light is actually describing that kind of scene. It reflects upon the screen the most hidden, each person's enormous private dreams and fears, hopes and horrors. We say that within a drama there is human life, within a play there is a whole world -- it is the same. Do the television dramas and the real scenes in reality shows reflect some of the events and phenomena of this world and this society? Of course they do. It is just that now fewer people watch television, and the scene he describes has moved onto the internet.

Television and your lives influence each other.

Television programs and our lives certainly have an influence on each other. For example, a long time ago, when television dramas were just becoming widespread in our country, mainland China aired a drama called Longing. The male and female leads became household names, and everyone used them as a reference when looking for a partner -- Liu Huifang and so on. Many classic television dramas became the memory of a generation: those born in the 60s have their own, those born in the 70s have their own, the 80s generation, the 90s generation, the 00s generation -- they can all name the television dramas they know by heart. These had a profound influence on individuals and on that era. But this influence is mutual; it is not that television dramas only influence you, you also influence television dramas.

But one point is central: it is not the master that creates your life. Television dramas have an influence, they influence part of your life, but they do not create your life. We watch television, and when we finish watching we just turn it off. Although we may be furious while watching, or cry our eyes out, after crying for a while it is over; turn off the television, and if you want to go eat hotpot, go eat hotpot; if you want to go eat barbecue, go eat barbecue -- you will not be affected by it for too long. It does not create the events it depicts. It shows a 2012 end of the world on television, but it will not make the end of the world actually happen to you. Yet many children, when they watch this movie, become very afraid and really believe the end of the world is coming. That is normal, because we know it will not happen. Television is television; the things acted out in a drama will not happen.

He gives an example:

Because of your great faith in technology, it often seems to many people that television creates violence, or creates a love of excessive materialism, or creates moral decay and licentiousness.

Many people say it is all because of television media -- now it is no longer called television, it is internet media -- it is all these short videos, TikTok and so on, promoting this materialism and vulgarity. Is that so? No. Be sure to remember: it is not that they influence society, it is not that they cause the lowering of social morality, it is not that they influence young people's values and materialistic views. Never, ever push this responsibility onto these media. They do have a mutual influence, but pay attention to that very important sentence above: television merely reflects -- and not only does it reflect, one might even say it does not distort; perhaps it reflects distortion, perhaps it does not distort -- it reflects the overall, generalized emotional and psychic patterns of contemporary society.

How does it reflect them? Through the production staff of television dramas -- the screenwriters, the actors -- through the cooperation of such group mentalities. Every person here is influenced by the era, whether screenwriter, director, producer, actor, even the extras -- all are influenced by the larger era. And under the cooperation of the collective group mentality, they are not leaders; they are followers, creative responders. They are not leaders, not the ones who create these underlying social events; they merely do a secondary processing and creation of social phenomena. Art comes from life; it is all a response to life.

So in the future, if someone tells you "the media has corrupted society, corrupted things," do not look at the problem that way anymore. Why not look at it that way? Because when you look at it that way, you are again pushing responsibility onto others. When we study spirituality, when we study, we must remember one thing above all: never, ever push responsibility onto others. When you push responsibility onto others, you give your sense of power to others as well. Because you think this matter was caused by others, and you are passive and powerless. Once you have this thought -- even if it is a small matter in which you are passive and powerless -- it can expand. Because we know this world is interlinked ring by ring, continuous and unbroken. You feel you have no decision-making power in this matter, but you say you have it in other matters, right? You say you have initiative in business, you have initiative in how to run a company; but in matters of the heart you have no initiative, because you cannot decide. Some people are the opposite: they may be very beautiful or handsome, or have high emotional intelligence, and they are at ease in relationships, but they cannot do business, they have no business sense. This mentality of handing initiative over to others -- the example I just gave is the same, blaming social phenomena on the media, on television dramas -- you are shirking responsibility.

This is the core point. Do not be influenced by these things; these things will not give you a sense of power, they will only make you more and more powerless, powerless in the face of social phenomena. None of this is wanted.

These are responses to contemporary social phenomena. Seth's wording is very professional; what I am saying is all plain talk. He says "the overall, generalized emotional and psychic patterns of the contemporary era." You see how precise Seth's wording is -- does it not show through everywhere? Flawless. The overall -- that is, the mainstream -- emotionalized, generalized emotional and psychic pattern of the contemporary era. And in the end he even uses the word "pattern."

What is a pattern? It means the content of your television dramas can be endlessly varied, the plots can be endlessly varied, but if you look at it from the angle of pattern, you will find it is one pattern. Hollywood blockbusters are all one pattern; Korean dramas are all one pattern -- the male and female leads love each other desperately, then one of them gets a terminal illness, either leukemia or some kind of lung cancer, and then they begin loving each other to death. That was a few years ago; now it has changed again, they are all domineering CEO types. Every era is different. Japan is the same: in a certain era the television dramas were like that, all on that one theme. The content can be endlessly varied, but the pattern is the same. So Seth's wording is precise, his expression is sharp, and his angle on problems is absolutely piercing.

Actors Who Choose Their Roles and the Audience

Those films and TV dramas all share a common pattern—they reflect the emotional and psychic patterns prevalent in the contemporary era. They also made choices about which dramas to take part in. These actors and production teams all made choices, and each person has roles they prefer. Even if the role is that of a maverick—a very special character, different from others, one of a kind—they will sometimes take it on. People are endlessly varied; every kind of person can find a role they like. Of course, for the actors, their roles in turn become a powerful part of their personal experience.

And those audience members—those of us who are just spectators eating melon seeds—mostly participate in the capacity of observers. Here his wording is very precise: "mostly" does not mean all. Most people view the drama from the position of an observer, from the perspective of a spectator, but a few individuals get drawn deep into the show. Then all sorts of strange things happen: for example, chasing a drama to the point of falling for an actor, and many star-chasers end up intersecting with real life—joining fan clubs, chasing after them every day, until eventually they can no longer distinguish right from wrong—when it comes to anything involving that actor, there is no longer any viewpoint of right or wrong, good or evil. Nowadays it is called a support group—"support" may be a term from Taiwan—in mainland China it is called a fan club.

Why am I bringing this up? Because recently in mainland China there was a very explosive matter, namely the Zheng Shuang affair. If you do not know about it, you can search online for the Zheng Shuang incident. Clearly, it has had an influence on your actual life: you merely liked one drama he acted in or one character in a drama, and from there you extended it to liking the actor, and even liking all the dramas and all the roles this actor has played, and then further extended it to supporting everything this actor says in real life—not in the drama—without any judgment of right or wrong.

He says that among these people, the majority are bystanders, while a small portion go inside and become lost in the drama.

Choosing Which Experiences to Participate In

He says you learn about the plays currently showing through newspapers and magazines -- now you don't even need newspapers or magazines, just glance at your phone and you know which new shows are premiering, which movies are coming out. You can see program previews. Sports events are the same -- for example, the Olympics was postponed by a year; whether there will still be an Olympics in 2021, or whether it will be postponed again to 2024, is uncertain. For example, next month a blockbuster is coming out, or on a certain day a TV station will begin airing a new drama series, and before that the trailers are already released. Now on YouTube, on Netflix, all kinds of trailers come out, all designed to attract you to watch. Don't you know exactly when to go watch which show?

He always adds a premise here, never making it absolute. He says generally speaking, you learn of the specific programs being performed in your own country and throughout the world in the same way. This reality of society is the same as the example he gives of TV stations broadcasting programs -- generally the same, and here it cannot be made absolute. What is the same? Except for those sudden events -- sudden to you -- most of the time, you will know which events are going to happen in your region, your country, or the area you cover. For example, school starts on September 1st, in a few more days it will be Spring Festival, and so on; for example, where an epidemic is currently breaking out, whether it is serious or not -- you know all of this.

So here, just like you choose which TV programs to watch, you choose whether or not to participate in this time. Then you decide which of these adventures you want to participate in, and you will experience those few events in normal life -- that is, in what we often call Framework 1, or this physical reality. If you insist on going toward it, you experience it. For example, suppose there is a presidential inauguration ceremony, and everyone says don't go, there might be chaos or danger, but you insist on going -- then you participate. You can go or not go; if you go, you may participate in this event; if you don't go, you stay home as a spectator watching the live broadcast, watching what happens after it ends -- either is fine. So you are the one who decides whether you want to participate, just the same as which TV drama or TV program you want to watch.

The inner workings that occur before your experience -- that is, before the event actually happens -- just like before a TV program actually airs -- before that, they take place in Framework 2, in that vast spiritual studio within the cosmic film production company. What does this mean? Before a real event is performed in physical society, it must first be performed in the world of Framework 2. The programs have all already been produced; it's just like TV programs -- when the time comes, it airs the program, and you can see it. All the dramas in Framework 2 have already been filmed; when it's time to perform them, they are broadcast.

All those scripts, all those possibilities exist -- it hasn't prepared just one script. The advantage of Framework 2 is that you can imagine this film company has enormous resources: money can be spent freely, unlimited funds, unlimited actors, unlimited energy, unlimited ability, unlimited performance venues. It can arrange all possible dramas within it, because it is a spiritual, cosmic thing, and the wealth of the cosmos, the ability of the cosmos, is unlimited. It can rehearse and produce all the possibilities of all dramas within it. What do you do? You are responsible for choosing: whichever one you want to watch, it will perform that one for you.

You say it performs live? No, everything is already arranged. If it were live, where would it find actors? Wouldn't the actors need to be assembled? If you want to perform a tragic drama, don't you need a partner, and someone to bully you a bit? Then who plays the bully, the villain? You have to find someone with a fierce-looking face, someone who looks like a bad guy, to play the villain. If he looks gentle and lovely, delicate and dependent, he couldn't play the role of the villain. So you should thank those bad bosses, bullies, and bad people who appear in your life. It wasn't easy for him to pick this actor -- he had to find such a role, someone who at a glance looks like a bad person, and when performed in life, is absolutely a bad person, vividly and completely a bad person.

So he has to prepare a lot of work. For you, this picky audience member -- you might want to watch this or that -- he has rehearsed all possible dramas for you. All the details have already been arranged.

For example, this seemingly chance encounter -- is it a chance encounter? Surely the actors were already waiting here. Before a specific concrete event occurs, there may be coincidences that must happen and cannot be explained. The male and female leads meet by chance in a cafe, and then a love story unfolds. You think that girl meeting you there was a chance encounter, but actually this girl, as an actress, was already arranged in Framework 2 -- arranged for the day you would go to that cafe, waiting for the appearance of you, her prince charming, and the two of you are to perform a love drama: what he will say first, what you will say next -- all these details are arranged.

Be sure to remember, all these details are arranged. Details, remember, details! Not just roughly. You underestimate this cosmic film production company too much -- if the details aren't done well, can it produce a masterpiece? Details determine success or failure, right? Would it be acceptable if the performance broke character? Arriving at this cafe and pulling out a Qing dynasty sachet -- wouldn't that give it away? Pulling out a phone from a previous era, taking out a brick-sized mobile phone -- wouldn't that break the performance? So their production is absolutely seamless. All the details are arranged: what clothes the female lead wears, what makeup she puts on, what bag she carries, what sunglasses she wears, what perfume she sprays -- all these details are arranged for you.

So many people ask, why can some fortune-tellers predict so accurately? Now you know -- it's all in Framework 2, so of course it's accurate, the details are all there. So now you know, every person you meet in life is not a coincidence, not a single thing is a coincidence. It's just that you feel it was performed for you. When you watch a TV drama and the male and female leads suddenly meet, "Oh wow, what a coincidence" -- don't you feel that was performed by actors? It's the same.

On the conscious level, and using only your consciousness, without letting any subconscious abilities or inner abilities participate, you could not keep your body alive for even one hour. Why? Because you don't know how to do it, you don't know how to maintain your life. Interesting, isn't it? You say, how could a person not know how to maintain their own life? Science is so advanced now, medicine is so advanced, and you don't even know how to maintain life? You don't need to go to the hospital and be put on a ventilator, because your life flows through you automatically and spontaneously.

This sentence must be remembered; it is not a metaphor or a figure of speech, it is literally true. Life flows through you automatically and spontaneously. At a certain point, you yourself can feel it and see this state. You take those details for granted -- breathing, the acquisition of nutrition, how each cell and tissue obtains nutrition, excretion, which things need to be eliminated and how they are eliminated, these inner workings, your blood pressure, the circulatory system, and maintaining your psychological continuity, ensuring the existence of your sense of self -- do you think these are easy? They are not easy. Now you use a computer to write a program; AI is so developed, computing power is so strong, but no matter how well you write it, you cannot write a conscious artificial intelligence. You cannot make AI acquire human consciousness -- that is the psychological continuity.

All of this happens in what is called Framework 2. He gives this example to prove the function of Framework 2 -- not only are the events of your life arranged by Framework 2, even your life, your body, is taken care of in Framework 2. Without Framework 2, this world of possibilities, this cosmic field of possibilities, there would be nothing of your physical world. This is the function of Framework 2: it can arrange everything, but all of this escapes your consciousness. It arranges your body, takes care of your body, and you don't even know it.

Undoubtedly, everything in that regard is working for your benefit.

Every cell in your body, every operation, every circulation, every absorption of nutrition and the excretion of the lungs -- all of it is to give your life the most optimized result.

Often when you become more concerned about your body, its functioning becomes less smooth.

Amazing, isn't it! Here is a reminder for everyone: people nowadays are a bit overly concerned about their physical health. Young people start talking about health preservation, in their thirties, some not even forty yet, and they start talking about health preservation every day. Girls just past twenty are afraid of getting old, slathering all kinds of skincare products on their faces -- originally delicate young girls, applying layer after layer. You say being too concerned is not good? Of course it's not good. Why? He just said, these are not things you should be operating on the conscious level; you simply cannot operate them on the conscious level. You originally handed it over to the unconscious, and it would take care of it well, but your consciousness insists on sticking its hand in -- eating this is bad for your health, that habit also affects your health -- your consciousness will affect your subconscious, but you originally shouldn't be managing these things, and you don't have the ability to manage them, yet you insist on jumping out, showing how capable you are. Go ahead and manage it -- the more you manage, the worse it gets.

Because originally the automated operation was running very well. What is called automation is exquisitely calculated on the subconscious level, and to you it seems like automation. It was running well, and you insist on sticking your hand in, with insufficient wisdom and insufficient ability, using your half-baked skills, listening to those so-called scientific experts and medical experts -- their understanding of the body is far too superficial. He tells you how to preserve health, and you take it and use it, and you are thoroughly destroying your body's self-automated operating mechanism, destroying the automatic and spontaneous process of life. You yourself don't have the ability to establish a better automatic and spontaneous ability, so your body deteriorates. Remember this: the more you focus on your body, the worse your body gets, the less smooth it becomes.

In the spontaneity of your body's functioning, there is clearly a subtle sense of order. Your body will arrange itself very well, automatically and spontaneously.

When you turn on a television set, the picture seems to come from nowhere onto the screen, yet that picture is the result of precision, focused attention, and order.

He uses television as an example. Now many 4K or even 8K televisions have indescribably clear pictures. Do you know how it presents such high-definition images on your home screen? You don't know, and you don't need to know. You don't need to be like a medical expert, pretending to hold a stethoscope and considering yourself a scientist. In the face of life's automatic spontaneity, those things are hardly worth mentioning.

The actors visit the agencies that cast roles.

Actors first have to belong to some agency. Normally actors have to find an agency; the agency has connections with production companies and film crews, and arranges roles for them. In your dreams, you also visit those agencies that cast roles -- without your knowing it. Where do all the characters in dreams come from? You found them all. Where do you go to find them? The agency has actors. Therefore you know that all the various dramas being considered for production are arranged by the actors from the agencies.

He gives a vivid example -- the agency, but this is only an example; be sure to remember, don't really think there is some company in dreams; there is no company. In the dream state, the dramas you arrange are not unfamiliar either; they are not too different from the scenes of your life. Because those actors are all selected from the few agencies you are familiar with; some may be closer, some more distant. So the things in dreams are not too different from the things in your reality. Although sometimes they are very bizarre, most dreams are another kind of plot of your real life, rather than leaping to a level you simply cannot understand.

If the actors show enough interest in those dramas, enough actors apply to perform. For example, your drama needs eight actors, but only three show up -- the drama can't be performed. There must also be enough resources, enough plot, enough storyline for the drama to be performed. There must be money, a venue, and a dream environment must be built. Many movies, like Inception, have an architect who builds his city in the dream world -- it's the same principle. You have to have this setting before the actors can go on stage.

When you are not in your normal conscious state, you visit those creative inner agencies. All concrete productions must begin there. You also have to meet with other people who, for their own reasons, are also interested in the same dramas. You have to talk with those actors: I have a drama here, will you perform in it? In this drama you'd be playing the villain -- think it over. That person says, I've recently been wanting to play a villain, I have all this energy with nowhere to use it; I'll take this drama, don't give it to anyone else. Don't you have to discuss it with them? He has to be interested in the drama. Remember, this is a metaphor. The technicians, writers, screenwriters -- they all gather there.

The result of this example will be a living event, not a broadcast event. It is not a TV drama filmed and then played back later; what they perform is a living event, that is, a real event. In the dream, this production team is established -- with crew, actors, director, screenwriter -- all prepared, and after rehearsing, this drama can be performed in real life.

There are disaster films, and there are also educational programs. When we go to school, from elementary school to university, aren't those all educational programs? It's the same as TV stations having educational channels. There are also religious dramas -- some people believe in this religion or that religion; religious dramas are also in the planning. All of these appear in the physical world in a very mature form. By the time they are rehearsed and performed, they are already very polished. Their acting skills are all superb, each one an Oscar-winning actor or actress; you absolutely cannot tell they are acting.

But after I explain all this, when you look back, there is a magical phenomenon: you can see that they are acting. Sometimes you suddenly have a feeling of detachment -- this drama is performed so wonderfully, full of emotion, overflowing with feeling, tears streaming down, laughter hearty, as if every cell is laughing. They are performing with their very souls. If we were to give them awards, this universe of ours would have nothing else to do but hand out awards all day.

You can observe and see whether you can spot their slip-ups. After trying, don't be afraid; sometimes you will suddenly have a dazed feeling -- the moment you discover they are acting, you will feel as if you have passed into another world. Since everyone is in the drama, why expose the other actors? You are also an actor; insisting on exposing other actors -- is that interesting? Just know it in your heart.

When such events occur, they are personal events -- the result of each person's beliefs, desires, and intents.

The occurrence of events is caused by three things: personal beliefs, personal desires, and personal intents. These three are actually quite similar. It is your personal will wanting something to happen, and the event happens. There is no such thing as an unexpected encounter. No death, no birth happens by chance; all are arranged. Just like when you watch an actor die in a TV show, you don't weep bitterly -- of course, if the plot is very moving, you may cry your heart out, but you don't really think he died; only the character died.

In Framework 2, in that creative atmosphere, intent is known. It is different from our three-dimensional world. In the three-dimensional world you have personal privacy, you have your own inner thoughts, and others can only speculate, unable to truly know. If you disguise yourself well, others may not discover it. But in Framework 2, what drama you want to perform, what purpose you want to achieve in this drama -- it is as obvious as Sima Zhao's intentions, known to everyone on the street. Because on that level, communication is through telepathy; what is in your heart is seen clearly by others.

From a certain perspective, no act is private. You say there is truly no privacy at all? No. The privacy of that world follows its own norms. Just as human society has privacy norms, different eras and different societies have different norms. For example, in America you cannot ask someone's salary, while in our country salaries used to be public, and now gradually they cannot be asked either. In the spiritual world it is the same; there is some privacy. So the phrase he uses is "in a manner of speaking" -- from the human perspective, that kind of human privacy is gone; what is in your heart is known to all. But beyond that, that reality has its own privacy requirements and norms.

What are those norms? First, I don't know; second, I haven't gone there to research it, and no one has told me. When you get there, you'll know, and then come back and tell us.

Your communication systems bring the events of the whole world into your living room.

Our broadcasting systems, television systems, network systems bring the events of the whole world before your eyes. Now you don't even need the living room; it's all on your phone. Yet that greater inner communication system is far more advantageous in scope.

That inner communication system is far more powerful than our internet. What its network transmits is not merely information -- our network transmits only information, called data, materials, whether you call it data or information, what it transmits is information. But in the broadcasting system of Framework 2, what is transmitted is holographic -- it is a feeling, a sensation, a concept; it does not need to rely on information to transmit; what it directly transmits is emotion, experience, sensation, concept, even your feelings and perceptions.

Every psychic act is imprinted upon the multidimensional screen of Framework 2.

Every event that occurs in Framework 2 can be called a psychic act. It is imprinted upon that super internet, and once imprinted, it remains there forever. There is no function for deleting posts, nor information censorship; once placed there, it exists forever. Everyone in Framework 2 can access this information. Just like when you post something online now, the whole world can search for it -- except your posts sometimes get deleted by the moderators.

And on other levels of consciousness, especially in the stages of sleep and dreaming, those events of inner reality are as ever-present as your waking concrete events, and are easily accessible.

Besides sleep and dreaming -- because he is speaking to ordinary people here, so he doesn't mention meditation -- when meditation is done well, you can also access it. So now you know why some people have the ability to tell fortunes and predict: it's all stored there. In there, there is no limitation of time and space; future events are also stored there, and past events are also stored there.

Framework 2 is like containing an infinite information service.

Like an infinitely large network, with a search engine. Its search engine is certainly not Google; it is a more intelligent system, where what you think is what you get. You don't even need to search; just think of it in your mind, and the information comes. It instantly puts you in touch with whatever knowledge you want. Searching for something still takes time, even if it is very fast now; but in that super quantum network, it is instantaneous -- there is no process of reading data, retrieving, transmitting, packaging, and decompressing.

It establishes a network between you and other people.

If Seth were transmitting this information in modern times, he wouldn't use a television as an example; he would use a mobile phone. In that era, television had just become popular, so of course using television as an example was better. In one or two hundred years, he might use a quantum computer as an example. He always uses the most advanced technology of the era, the knowledge that everyone is generally familiar with, to convey what he wants to convey. That thing is always within us; the metaphor is only to help us understand him.

It computes probabilities at dizzying speed.

What is the speed of a quantum computer? I'm not an expert in this field, so let me give a simple example. The current capability of quantum computers is roughly seven hundred billion times that of today's fastest supercomputer in the world³⁰ -- not seventy million, but seven hundred billion times. So you know the difference between quantum computing and ordinary computing. And that is only the current immature quantum computing; when it matures in the future, I have even less idea how many times more it will be. So that inner network operates at a quantum computing speed beyond human imagination.

Yet it is not a computer.

Although it operates like a quantum computer, it is not a computer. It is alive, and has emotions.

It can look after the best purposes of each person in your network.

The events you want to perform in this network, the psychic acts you want to realize -- it has your intent. It will perfectly look after each person's intent, so that these intents do not conflict with one another -- it cannot look after your intent at the expense of harming someone else's intent.

It holds each person's best purposes in its heart.

Why do we say it is not a computer? Because a computer has no heart. That inner network is like a living thing; it holds each person's best purposes in its heart, and does so with loving intent. What loving intent? To fulfill your dreams, to realize what your heart desires. It operates, rehearses, arranges, and helps you find actors with this love. It must take into account all the people involved in this event, with the same love for everyone.

You cannot get what you want at the expense of another.

This point is key; be sure to remember it. So when we study the law of attraction, study the 24-week Master Key System³¹, study the 21-day Abundance Journey³², I always emphasize: the wishes you make, the goals you want to achieve, the ideals you want to realize, must allow every person involved in the matter to gain benefit and improvement from it. This is not limited to the monetary aspect. If you don't do this, you are violating the operating mechanism of this inner system. You say I only want to get promoted and rich, to maximize my own benefit -- do you think the universe can fulfill this wish of yours? It cannot, because it conflicts with its philosophy, with the operating mechanism of Framework 2 -- this super, humanized, loving quantum network -- and you will be kicked out directly; it will not be executed.

Now you understand. So Seth is amazing; he can explain the deep inner principles of this matter clearly, and you can understand why the psychological laws require this of you -- not without reason.

You cannot, therefore, use Framework 2 to force something upon another person.

This is also a question many people ask me: you say that pursuing your highest inner joy can manifest it, but what if my highest inner joy is to bully men and oppress women -- I just like that pretty young girl, can I use my beliefs to create reality and manifest her? Or I just like that handsome young man, can I gather them all into my home? Can you? Now you know you cannot. Then if I want to find a handsome man, can this wish not be realized? No, that's not it. You cannot force it; you have to find the kind where -- he also happens to want to find you, and the two of you can match; he likes you so much he can't stand it, and you also like him. Who arranges it for you two? It is in that inner, loving cosmic network; it will help you find it.

So this solves it: you say can I go rob a bank? That is impossible. You cannot force it upon others. Many people ask, I've studied the psychological laws, can I make my girlfriend be devoted only to me? Can I make the boy I secretly love take the initiative to confess to me and not like any other woman? If he is willing, it can happen; if you force it, it cannot. This is something to be negotiated on that level.

Before you can concretely experience a desired result, certain prerequisites must be met.

The universe is all-powerful, but the universe has its own operating laws; you cannot go against them. So the Tao Te Ching says: Man follows the ways of Earth, Earth follows the ways of Heaven, Heaven follows the ways of Tao, and Tao follows the ways of nature³³. Tao following nature must have a most core law. As long as you conform to its laws, you can operate very well; if you disregard everything and only operate according to your individual ego's will, that is wishful thinking, and you will get nothing.

He says:

I will try to proceed with our book in a somewhat more predictable fashion, while still maintaining our own discussion. I will answer any questions you may have.

See how impressive he is, daring to say "any questions," proving Seth has real skill. But he also says:

I do want to use more general Framework 2 material in our book.

Framework 2 is not just personal. You can understand it as a field of possibilities, a matrix of possibilities. It is not a linear, interlocking structure, but a three-dimensional, even holographic network structure -- four-dimensional, five-dimensional, six-dimensional, events nested within events, events both inside and outside. In this book, Seth wants to focus on discussing the general issue of individual and mass events, and will not explore overly specific personal issues.

You can use any other material you want; you can also ask me for anything, and I will give it to you. But for this book I will not rely on that material.

They held many private sessions in private, discussing many personalized, thematic topics. Seth said this book does not discuss those individualized issues; it discusses the big principles and the big themes -- how personal reality and mass reality are formed, and what their relationship is.

The second half of this session is just some notes, so I will go through it quickly.

Seth talked about Framework 1 and Framework 2 across seven sessions. When I wrote a passage about their suggestions on October 26, this spontaneous creation not only summarized what I had learned from the new Seth session material, but also gave me something I could read every day. I pinned copies on the walls of my painting studio and writing studio.

After learning the theory of Framework 1 and Framework 2, Rob and Jane began to put it into practice, manifesting the events they wanted to happen in their lives. He posted this declaration on the walls of the studio where he painted every day and the studio where he wrote, so he could see it every day and read it a few times every day. He was precisely using the practice of psychological laws to strengthen his own beliefs.

This passage was written and tailored according to my own beliefs and needs.

So each of us can imitate what he did and write a passage of our own -- there is absolutely no need to copy his.

As Seth continues his material on frameworks in this book, some of the implications may become clearer to readers.

Framework 1 and Framework 2 -- he only begins to expand on them later. As you study further, there will be some new understandings, new implications that become clearer.

I also try to present it as close as possible to the time in which he conceived it.

Rob said, when I wrote this passage, I was only going by my understanding of Framework 1 and Framework 2 at that time. When you study it, in a certain chapter of Part Two, Framework 1 and Framework 2 will be discussed in detail, and by then your understanding will be deeper and clearer. This thing may not be as applicable then, so you will need to adjust it yourselves.

Anyone who is interested can hold it in mind, and will eventually write his own version of it for his own personal use.

Below is the creed Rob wrote on December 26. He said, reading these creeds about Framework 1 and Framework 2 casually every day is indeed very useful. Each of you can write a passage of your own based on it, and keep updating it as you study Framework 1 and Framework 2 later on.

Rob wrote:

I have the simple, deep faith that anything I desire in this life can descend to me from Framework 2. In Framework 2 there are no obstacles. Framework 2 can creatively produce everything I want in Framework 1 -- my excellent health, my painting and writing, my wonderful relationship with Jane, Jane's own spontaneous and radiant health and creativity, and ever-improving sales of all his books. I know that all these positive goals will be accomplished in Framework 2, no matter how complicated they may seem, and that they can manifest in Framework 1. I have the simple, deep faith that everything I desire in this life can be handled by the infinite creative ability of Framework 2, which can produce everything I might ask of it. All I need is a simple, deep faith in the creative goodness of Framework 2.

It is written quite well. You can borrow from it, or you can set it aside entirely and write a passage of your own faith in Framework 1 and Framework 2. After you write it, read it aloud a few times every day, and the miracles of manifestation in your life will be beyond counting. If you do not believe it, you can give it a try -- trying it costs nothing -- what if it works? First write out your current understanding, and as your understanding deepens, keep correcting it and revising it.

---

注释与核实

1. Source: South China Morning Post, "Death of 22-year-old Pinduoduo employee renews controversy over China's 996 overwork culture, sparking an investigation" (https://www.scmp.com/tech/big-tech/article/3116385/death-22-year-old-pinduoduo-employee-renews-controversy-over-chinas) ↩

2. According to Mike's original words: "British scientists published a paper, they said that animal fat, such as lard—what we often call pig fat—is ranked second or third among the healthiest foods"; upon verification, it should be "In the BBC's 2018 list of the 'most nutritious foods' based on nutritional analysis of over 1,000 raw foods, lard (pig fat) ranked 8th with a nutritional score of about 74, not second or third." (Source: Wikipedia, "Pig fat," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pig_fat) ↩

3. This claim could not be verified. ↩

4. Source: Fox News, "Vegan blogger eating meat again, claims diet caused 'early menopause'" (https://www.foxnews.com/food-drink/vegan-blogger-eating-meat-diet-menopause-claim) ↩

5. Source: Wikipedia, "TENET" (https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/TENET%E5%A4%A9%E8%83%BD) ↩

6. This claim could not be verified. ↩

7. This claim could not be verified. ↩

8. Source: U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA), "ZYNTEGLO" (https://www.fda.gov/vaccines-blood-biologics/zynteglo) ↩

9. This claim could not be verified. ↩

10. Source: National Palace Museum, "Following the Way of Nature: Exhibition of Daoist Classics and Cultural Relics—Emperors and Daoism" (https://theme.npm.edu.tw/TaoFollows/en/page_4) ↩

11. This claim could not be verified. ↩

12. This claim could not be verified. ↩

13. This claim could not be verified. ↩

14. This claim could not be verified. ↩

15. Source: Wu Cheng'en, Journey to the West, Chapter 3 (https://www.shidianguji.com/book/NA11023/chapter/1k291tcwqjvgq) ↩

16. This claim could not be verified. ↩

17. Source: Department of Natural Resources of Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region, "Bama: The 'Natural Force' on the Road to Rural Revitalization," 2022 (https://dnr.gxzf.gov.cn/xwzx/zrzx/t16503436.shtml) ↩

18. Source: Wikipedia, "MD Anderson Cancer Center" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MD_Anderson_Cancer_Center) ↩

19. Source: Mayo Clinic, "Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota" (https://www.mayoclinic.org/patient-visitor-guide/minnesota) ↩

20. Source: Jane Roberts, The Afterdeath Journal of an American Philosopher: The World View of William James, 1980 (https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Afterdeath_Journal_of_an_American_Ph.html?id=Y44wAAAACAAJ) ↩

21. Source: Colleen Walsh, "The wisdom of William James" (https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2011/12/william-james-lecture/) ↩

22. According to Mike's original words: "the Soviet Union collapsed in 1989"; upon verification, it should be "The Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, not 1989." (Source: U.S. Department of State, Office of the Historian, "The Collapse of the Soviet Union," https://history.state.gov//milestones/1989-1992/collapse-soviet-union) ↩

23. According to Mike's original words: "Russia's GDP is only equivalent to that of Shenzhen, a city in China"; upon verification, it should be "In nominal GDP terms, Shenzhen's GDP in 2025 is about $557.3 billion, while Russia's is about $2.27 trillion, so Russia is roughly equivalent to 4.1 Shenzhens." (Source: Wikipedia, "List of cities by GDP," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_cities_by_GDP) ↩

24. Source: Wikipedia, "Conversations with God" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conversations_with_God) ↩

25. Source: U.S. CDC, "Reflections on the 1976 Swine Flu Vaccination Program" (https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/12/1/05-1007_article) ↩

26. According to Mike's original words: "In the mid-1960s (around 1963, 1964, 1965, 1966), a batch of polio vaccines was administered"; upon verification, it should be "The 'Cutter Incident' in the United States occurred in 1955: some polio vaccines that had been administered contained live virus that had not been inactivated, leading to more than 250 cases of polio, not in 1963–1966." (Source: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "Historical Vaccine Concerns," 2024, https://www.cdc.gov/vaccine-safety/historical-concerns/index.html) ↩

27. Source: David J. Sencer, J. Donald Millar, "Reflections on the 1976 Swine Flu Vaccination Program," 2006 (https://wwwnc.cdc.gov/eid/article/12/1/05-1007_article) ↩

28. Source: Wikipedia, "Color television" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Color_television) ↩

29. Source: National Bureau of Statistics, "Residents' Living Standards Continuously Improve and Consumption Quality Clearly Upgrades—Series Report No. 4 on Economic and Social Development Achievements in the 40 Years of Reform and Opening Up" (https://www.stats.gov.cn/zt_18555/ztfx/ggkf40n/202302/t20230209_1902584.html) ↩

30. This claim could not be verified. ↩

31. Source: Wikipedia, "The Master Key System" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_Key_System) ↩

32. Source: Deepak Chopra official website, "21-Day Meditations" (https://www.deepakchopra.com/21-day-meditations) ↩

33. Source: Laozi, Tao Te Ching, Chapter 25 (from Laozi Daodejing Jiaoshi as included in the Chinese Text Project, ctext.org) (https://ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=en&chapter=554341) ↩