Mike's commentary · The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, Chapter 6

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

Guided Reading

This chapter begins with the paranoid's misinterpretation of harmless events, showing how personal beliefs distort individual and collective events, and how private symbols obscure sensory data and thereby disrupt the mind-body balance. It then contrasts religious and scientific fanatics, pointing out that both stem from closed belief systems, rigid attitudes, and an obsession with ends, disregarding process and human life. It goes on to discuss viruses as concrete forms of thought, whose lethality is triggered by emotional and psychic infection, and is related to the weakening of individual or social values. Dreams and mass events, in turn, influence each other through the concretization of symbols.

Key Points of This Chapter

• The paranoid imposes private symbols onto sense data, throwing the balance between personal reality and collectively shared reality off kilter.
• Once the mind-body balance tips toward the subjective, the individual may take the fantasy world as the only reality.
• Both religious and scientific zealots tend to close off their belief systems, reject human nature, and let the end override the means and life itself.
• Viruses possess social cooperation; their lethal effects are triggered by emotional and psychic infection, and are connected to an individual's wish to die or to the weakening of social values.
• Thoughts are concrete parts of the body; psychic immunity precedes physical immunity; dreams and mass events trigger and materialize each other in symbolic ways.

Main Text

Today we begin sharing Part Three of The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, titled "People Who Are Frightened of Themselves." The first section of Part Three is Chapter Six, titled "Controlled Environments, and Positive and Negative Collective Behavior, Religious and Scientific Cults, and Personal Paranoia." This chapter's title is rather long, and from the title alone you can see it touches on several aspects: what positive or negative collective behaviors exist within controlled collective environments, as well as the causes and background behind them; how both the religious and scientific fields can give rise to cults -- not only religious cults, but also scientific cults; and finally, the issue of personal paranoia.

Let us look at Session 812 in the book. We already covered Session 834 in the previous section, but this session began on Saturday, October 1, 1977, at 9:33 p.m. -- the previous session was already from March 1979, so this session took place more than a year earlier. Why is it placed here? Mike said that when Seth originally gave them Session 812 sixteen months earlier, he had told them it would serve as part of a later chapter in this book, and Rob and the others could see this note in the annotations to Session 814.

On the day of Session 812, Jane and Rob had an unexpected visitor -- someone showed up at their door without an appointment. In the notes to Session 814, it is explained that this person was a paranoid individual. Although the summary he provided did not involve private content, it was very well suited as material for this book. After Seth confirmed the title Jane had given for Chapter Six of Part Three, they immediately knew they had found a good place for this material. Mike especially emphasized that they made this decision without asking Seth -- he felt that this session's discussion of personal paranoia and paranoid individuals fit the title of Chapter Six particularly well. So that is how the order of this chapter came about.

Paranoia and Its Manifestations

Seth says the theme of this chapter is "paranoia and its manifestations." He considers paranoia to be extremely interesting -- although on the surface it is not interesting, and if you have ever encountered a paranoid patient, you would only find it troublesome. But in essence it is extremely interesting, because it shows how a private belief -- a personal belief -- can distort those collective events involving the individual and others.

Those events -- some are personal events, some are collective events -- are all distorted. Yet, although the paranoid person is convinced that those events are reliable, his conviction does not change other people's perception of the same events. This is a very interesting point: regarding the same event, each person's perception is different.

Surely many people have come into contact with paranoid or delusional patients. Let me give some examples I have seen, examples that really happened. One person was at home watching television, and when he saw the big tiger in Animal World, he became especially frightened, believing that the tiger was a real tiger and was coming to eat him -- he would immediately jump up, turn around, and run, dashing into his room and shutting the door. Do not think it is funny; it really is like that. Another situation: while watching a war drama, when he saw a scene of troops being reviewed, he would stand straight up on the sofa and salute -- he felt that he was that soldier. There are very, very many types of delusions.

Another example: a person had done multi-level marketing in his early years and made a lot of money, but somehow he suddenly developed a delusional disorder. He always felt that someone wanted to harm him, that someone wanted to arrest him, and he even felt that the public security bureau or the local police station was arresting him -- when in fact none of that was happening. At that time he had indeed deceived many people in multi-level marketing, mostly relatives and friends, but the law was not yet complete at the time, and no one could hold him accountable. Yet he kept imagining that someone was arresting him, and he ran everywhere; his family could not keep watch over him, and he ran all over the streets. Until one day, while he was running frantically on the main road, he was hit by a bus, his leg was crushed, and his reproductive organs were crushed as well. After the collision, his delusional disorder actually got better -- but his body was left with permanent disability.

These are two examples of delusional disorder that I saw with my own eyes, and in your lives you may have encountered other types as well.

Misinterpretation of Harmless Events

Seth says:

I want to emphasize the paranoid person's misinterpretation of harmless individual and mass events.

Note the premise -- harmless. An event itself has no harm whatsoever to the person involved or to others. In the eyes of a paranoid person, how does he view such a harmless event?

And Seth emphasizes that physical events can be symbolically combined -- that is, seen through the eyes of a paranoid person, real, physical events can be recombined in a symbolic way. For example, the TV is just acting out a drama, but he will stand up and salute; normal people are just walking, but he feels they are following him; an ordinary person makes an ordinary gesture, and he feels it is a plot to catch him. These physical events themselves have nothing to do with him and are harmless, but under his symbolic combination they become a terrifying form -- he feels that everyone in the world is chasing him, and everywhere there are hidden people tracking him.

Therefore, a reality can be created by them -- he creates a reality in which people everywhere are trying to kill him, where the FBI or the public security bureau or the police are everywhere trying to arrest him. And that reality is almost partly physical and partly dreamlike. What is that tiny physical part? When someone else takes out a phone to make a call, he feels they are reporting his whereabouts; when someone else takes a photo, he feels they are photographing him. The other half is what he fantasizes.

Seth then explains a principle we are familiar with:

You must interpret events in a personal manner.

Everyone interprets the same event in a personal way, and everyone's angle is different -- this is normal. Moreover, you create events. As for how we create events, this was covered in detail earlier in Chapter Five, "The Mechanics of Experience": you first have a feeling, and then you go and match it, attracting related events to you.

However, there is also a meeting point of shared actual contact to some extent -- what does this mean? Although each person creates their own events and interprets events from their own angle, there are still some public, shared events that everyone agrees on. For example, the event of a bus arriving at a stop -- everyone's cognition of it is consistent, and there will be no deviation. This kind of practice is a meeting point between personal experience and events on which everyone reaches a consensus -- an intersection between personal experience and public events, and this public event is recognized by the majority of people, including you.

This thing that is shared and recognized by the majority, Seth gives it a name, calling it the sense plateau:

This sense plateau provides a stable enough basis for the agreement of a collectively shared world.

What it means is that beneath the sense plateau, the basic structure of the world is solid -- no matter what you think, rivers flowing through streams, green grass, green trees, the earth, these are all solid and stable foundations, with no deviation. Although the feeling of looking at a tree varies from person to person -- some grieve over spring, some lament over autumn -- most people's basic cognition of this tree, of the four seasons, and of this world is consistent. The same goes for social events; we have a common cognition. This thing is called the collectively shared world, and within it there is a common agreement: we all agree that this is a cup, this is a table, this is a car, this is money, this is a villa... Such a collective agreement provides us with a stable foundation. Without this stable foundation, the collectively shared world could not exist; it would fall into chaos.

But remember, this collectively shared world is different in our dreams. In dreams, your world is not the same as other people's worlds -- you have your world, and others have theirs. The sharing there is not stable enough, so dreams cannot be shared with others, because within them there is instability; only you can perceive them, and others cannot.

The Mentally Disturbed: Private Symbols Obscuring Sense Data

Most mentally disturbed people -- what kind of person are we dealing with here?

Their private symbols are so strongly superimposed upon the primary sense data that even that data sometimes becomes almost invisible.

That data refers to the sufficiently stable foundation within the collectively shared world -- the stable facts perceived by the sensory plateau and collectively acknowledged by everyone. He cannot see it, almost cannot see it. The reality that everyone acknowledges, he does not acknowledge -- not that he refuses to acknowledge it, but that he truly cannot see it. What he sees is entirely sense data overlaid with intense private symbols.

Let me give another example. A person gave birth to a child in America, was staying at a postpartum care center, and with nothing else to do, she started having the child's fortune told and looking up names online, searching all over the internet. The fortune-telling contained both good and bad statements, touching on all sorts of aspects, yet she fixated only on the bad one -- the fortune-teller said that a child born at this particular time might have the possibility of dying young. That was just one possibility among many statements, but that is how she understood it.

From then on, she went without sleep for about seven or eight days straight, night after night unable to sleep, thinking about what to do if the child died young, searching everywhere for how to break the curse, how to resolve it. In the end she developed depression. When a person gets stuck in a mental rut and does not sleep at all for seven or eight days, the brain has already developed problems. Many cases of depression begin as thought problems in the early stage, but in the later stage, what the brain secretes is no longer the same as in a normal person. At that point, no matter how you try to persuade her, it does not help.

Actually, her calculation was not even correct -- she used the zodiac time of the American birthplace and applied the Chinese method of calculating the Eight Characters, and she did not even get the hour right. But telling her this was already useless; she could not listen to anything anyone said, feeling that others were all just comforting her, deceiving her, coaxing her, firmly believing that the child was not long for this world. She cried every day, crying for her poor child and her fate. Those shared events -- the public objective data -- she could no longer see. For example, she absolutely refused to let her husband drive, insisting on driving herself, because she always felt that if her husband drove there would be a car accident. But is the probability of an accident not the same whether she drives or her husband drives? She firmly believed that her husband driving would bring about that consequence.

Seth summarizes this type of person:

They often use the physical world in the same way that most people use the dream world.

They live in a dreamlike state, with their own set of logic and interpretations. For them, it is very difficult to distinguish whether an event or reality is personal or collectively shared -- they think it is collective, when actually it is only personal to them, but they feel it is an event that everyone can see.

Many such people are highly creative and imaginative; many artists are like this. However, when dealing with the reality shared by the masses, they usually have less of a solid foundation than others -- normally it is fine, but once they interact with society they lack that foundation, because they do not accept what everyone acknowledges. Thus they will attempt to impose their own private symbols upon the world, or attempt to form a completely private world where no one disturbs them. Like the example I just gave, he felt that people were chasing him everywhere, and saw everyone as trying to harm him.

Seth says that, generally speaking, such people are suspicious of interpersonal relationships and constantly on guard.

The Relationship Between Personal Reality and Mass Reality

Then he said something worth understanding deeply:

Each person forms his own reality, and that is a fact. Yet that personal reality must also be shared by others, and must be influenced by the realities of others.

You create your own reality -- we have studied this point repeatedly. But is the reality you create also perceived and shared by others? And is this reality also influenced by the realities others create? You influence others, and others influence you. This is a mutual relationship, much like the net of Indra spoken of in Buddhism¹ -- the jewels reflecting one another.

Seth went on to say that, as creatures living within time and space, our senses -- the normal five senses -- provide us with extremely clear data: what can be heard is heard, what can be seen is seen, consistently presenting one physical reality. Each person may respond to the seasons in a very personal way -- spring, summer, autumn, and winter are spring, summer, autumn, and winter for everyone, but each person's response is different; some like a certain season, some dislike a certain season. Yet you all share those natural events. Whether you like it or not, the feelings spring brings have a common aspect -- even animals can feel it, let alone people. These natural events provide the framework for your experience -- a large background. Against this large background, your conscious mind can interpret other sensory data as clearly and correctly as possible.

That is to say, you cannot perceive the feelings of summer in winter -- this is a large framework, and it allows a certain freedom of action necessary for the activities of the psyche and the body. Although it is the same winter, different people feel it differently. In northern China in winter, the indoor temperature is very high -- outside it is more than ten degrees below zero, but inside it is more than twenty degrees above zero. In the south in winter, outside it is five, six, seven, eight degrees, and inside it is also five, six, seven, eight degrees -- actually more uncomfortable. So each person has a common recognition of the seasons, and also has their own unique feelings.

Seth said:

You are an imaginative species. The physical world is colored and charged by the projections of your own imagination.

We are imaginative. Where does the physical world come from? From imagination. How did our world come into being? It was produced by imagination. Therefore, whether it is events in the physical world or objectively existing things, they are all projected, colored, and charged by our imagination -- charged with what? Charged with the great power of emotion. Driven by powerful emotional force, our imagination projects outward and gives the physical world its dynamism. Without this dynamism, the things of the natural world would cease to exist. They are jointly created by everyone, and we are constantly supplying them with power.

Then Seth gave a very practical suggestion:

When your mind is disturbed or you are angry, turn your attention back to the natural world, to feel its effect upon you. This is an excellent idea, and its effect is different from that of your own projections.

What does this passage mean? When your mind is disturbed, when you are angry, when you are furious, go back into nature and take a walk, and you will feel much better. Why? If you do not go back into nature, and instead stay in your own small environment -- the small environment around you is entirely the result of your own projections, projected by your own imagination plus emotion. But at this time you are angry, furious, your emotions carry rage, and the environment around you must also be projected from this rage. Staying in such an environment does you no good at all if you want to ease that state of boiling fury. So Seth suggests the best way is to go back into nature.

Nature will naturally bring you positive healing, because although nature also contains your projections, your personal influence is very weak -- it is shaped more by collective force, by the imagination and emotional projections of all humanity. It is not entirely subject to your personal influence. On the contrary, the positive energy and healing function it brings far outweigh the negative effects caused by your own projections when you stay in a small environment. This is something everyone can draw on: when you are angry or your mind is disturbed, go into nature, stay quietly for a while, and you will feel better.

Sensory Data and Balance

Seth again emphasizes that you form your own reality. But if you are in the northeastern United States in winter -- not the northwest, where Seattle winters are not too cold; he means the northeast, around Boston, all of New England and Maine -- winters there are very cold with heavy snow. He says you had better still experience a concrete winter. If you live in such an icy, snowy environment yet feel as if you were in a tropical rainforest, that shows you have strayed too far from your primary sensory data. A slight detachment can bring some sensory stimulation, but if this detachment is persistent, it will make you doubt the reality of physical life. In terms of Chinese medicine, this is like acting out of season, which is not good for you -- if you detach too far from reality, you cannot receive nature's healing, and you can only keep living inside your own sensory world.

The Example of the Hypothetical Person Peter

Next, Seth uses a hypothetical person to demonstrate how paranoid beliefs operate. Suppose there is a person named Peter, who is convinced that he has a healthy body and is quite proud of his mental stability -- all paranoids have this trait: they absolutely refuse to admit that there is anything wrong with their mind. Then, suppose that Peter, for some reason of his own, decides that his body is going to cause him trouble and punish him. It is not the FBI coming after him, but his own body coming after him.

He can symbolically select one organ or one particular function -- walking is a function, smelling is also a function -- and misinterpret it as many bodily events, just as another person might misinterpret mass events. In life, you really do often encounter this kind of situation: I feel uncomfortable here, I feel uncomfortable there, and I think it is some kind of punishment -- karmic retribution, family heredity, or caused by something or other. Mass events in themselves do not carry much meaning, but when viewed through the colored glasses of personal paranoia with strong symbolism, they seem to be directed specifically at him.

For example, suppose a certain leader loses an election. That is a mass event, but some people will commit suicide over it, set themselves on fire, or resist to the death -- in fact, the failure of a political party in an election does not have that huge an impact on every ordinary person. You cannot say it has no impact, but it absolutely should not drive you to death. Yet this person feels that death is the best form of release, and he is misinterpreting this mass event.

Another example is public service announcements -- protect your liver, do not smoke, protect your lungs, protect your heart, and so on. If these announcements mention a certain type of symptom that relates to his sensitive area, it will immediately put him on alert. For instance, the media says that an itchy back may be one of the early symptoms of lung cancer. He happens to have had an itchy back recently, so he thinks he has lung cancer. They were only doing a public service announcement, saying that some lung cancer patients do indeed have this symptom in the early stages, and he applies it to himself. He will unconsciously focus his attention on that part of his body, feel an unbearable itch, and anticipate its malfunction.

Then, Peter can actually change the actual condition of his body -- this is not a joke. When he anticipates lung trouble with belief, he can really make his lungs develop problems. He will interpret events that were originally only cautionary in nature in a negative way, viewing them as threats, so that certain quite normal sensations -- such as an itchy back -- play the same role as the fear of the police. If a normal back should not itch, then who are all those back scratchers sold on every street corner meant for?

If he continues like this, after enough time, he will really cause tension in some part of his body; and by telling other people about it, he not only makes himself tense, but also spreads it everywhere: my lungs have been uncomfortable lately, my back has started itching. He not only affects his own world, but also affects the group world he comes into contact with -- first affecting his family, and then everyone around him knows he has a stomach ulcer or some other ailment. In this kind of situation, what we are dealing with is a misinterpretation of basic sense data.

Speaking of this, I recall someone on YouTube who sent me a private message, saying that his father had also developed a similar kind of delusional disorder. His father always felt that there were bugs biting him everywhere. No matter how much he bathed, no matter how much he washed the sheets and blankets, he always felt that swarms upon swarms of dense bugs were gnawing at him, and he could not sleep at all. No one else could see them, but he could. In the end, he felt that life was worse than death. There are also people who hallucinate ghosts around them, monsters, and terrifying visions of gaping bloody mouths.

Here I should offer a reminder: you cannot casually jump to the conclusion that everything we see is something spiritual, that it is the higher self or some high-level conscious entity coming to contact you. Do not attribute everything you do not understand to that -- very often it is simply a problem with the senses, a hallucination, a misinterpretation of basic sense data. If you have never encountered this kind of person, you will think I am telling stories; if you have had such a person in your family or around you, you will know this is reality -- you cannot say it is very common, but you do occasionally come across it.

The Balance Between Mind and Matter

Seth says that when he says a person misunderstands sense data, he means:

The balance between mind and matter has tipped too far in one direction.

There is a balance between mind and matter, and this is very subtle. Seth does not elaborate on it, and I do not intend to either -- we have already covered a great deal of this earlier. To put it simply, our physical world is a projection of our thoughts. The previous chapters have been discussing this all along, including the idea that the events you experience are also a matter of first having a psychological feeling and then seizing upon events to match it. But if that is the case, then what is the difference between this and a dream? Yet in real life, we do not actually feel that these things are our projections, nor do we feel that events are things we have seized upon -- unless one has reached a very high level and can maintain constant awareness. Most people do not have this, because you are living right inside these events. You are projecting, creating, and feeling all at the same time, and you cannot separate these things out, so you can only treat them as an objective, actual existence.

In other words, your mind first creates an event or a physical object, and then you use your senses to perceive it, and what you perceive is then sent back into the psyche to reinforce it. This process seems simple, and we run through it automatically thousands of times every day, but the principle behind it is extremely subtle and profound. It is by no means something that can be dismissed with a single phrase like "I create my reality."

In the eighth batch of materials there is an article, which I also posted to the group at New Year's, about the balance between the heart and the brain. It discusses how our inner consciousness, or heart, is mapped out through the brain, and how the heart then reflects back again, perceiving through the senses what has been projected outward, and then comparing it with the information returning to the brain -- there is inevitably a discrepancy between these two things, and this discrepancy is what produces your feeling. You can look up that document on the heart-brain balance discussed by Bashar².

My main point today is still the same idea: between the physical world projected outward by your thoughts, and the physical world you perceive back through your senses, there is a relationship of balance. On the one hand you create the physical world, and on the other hand you use your senses to perceive it, and this balance cannot tip too far toward either side. Ordinary materialists believe only in matter and do not believe that imagination and beliefs create reality -- that is leaning toward the side of matter. Paranoids and the pathologically self-absorbed lean too far toward the side of mind, believing only that everything is created by the mind. Neither direction is appropriate. We live in a three-dimensional physical world, and the best approach is to achieve this balance.

Psychic Events and Events That Connect the World

Seth goes on to say that some events are events that connect the world -- the connecting points that tie together all the events that have been strung together. Although generally speaking, these events come from outside this world order, and do not occur according to the causal sequence within the world -- we say that poverty leads to riots, that elections produce certain results, but anyone who has studied the Seth material knows that the true origin of events does not lie within this world. Where does it come from? As we discussed earlier, it comes from Framework 2 -- that level is no longer in this world. The source is not in this world, but when it manifests, it does so within this world order, and it appears to have a logical explanation that accords with common sense.

Then he says:

The reality of these events is the result of a precise balancing of forces, so that certain psychic events appear very real, while others appear peripheral.

Here he is focusing on psychic events -- those psychic events that connect material world events together. What does "connecting" mean? It means finding a reason for the things that happen in the world. For example, this time Trump was not elected because the pandemic was not handled well, or because of some other reason -- we make up stories about these scattered events and string them together. This made-up story is what he calls a psychic event.

The emergence of this psychic event is the result of a precise balancing of various forces. So some psychic events are extremely real to us, while others we ignore and do not feel -- which ones are real and which ones are ignored depends entirely on how that balance is managed. So many things happen in the world; how to explain them, how to interpret them, is entirely up to you. You can explain them however you want, and of course other people will also present their own explanations.

This is very much like those current affairs programs: some news commentators string together all the events of the world -- the surge in Bitcoin, Tesla, rocket launches, climate warming, the deep state -- they can connect anything and everything, and release a video. This kind of thing is called a psychic event. But each person's interpretation is completely different. And people with psychic delusions are precisely the ones who go wrong at this stage: in the process of explaining and interpreting the world, they bring in too strong and too paranoid a personal symbolic coloring.

Dusk and Dawn

Seth gave an example to illustrate what happens when balance is disturbed. He said that dusk and dawn—if you are not wearing a watch and are suddenly placed into a scene—are actually quite hard to tell apart. Suppose you got drunk the night before, felt dizzy and awful, went home and slept, and slept all the way until the next afternoon when it was getting dark. There was no one else around, you were lying in bed alone, looking at the dusk colors outside the window, and you would think it was dawn—you were too groggy to tell whether it was evening or morning. Anyone who has had this experience will understand what I mean.

What he was describing should be waking up at dusk, not waking up in the middle of the night—if you wake up in the middle of the night, the sky is dark, so you would not get confused. Only when you wake up at dusk can you not tell the difference, and at that moment your personal reality and physical reality have diverged—you personally think it is dawn, but it is actually dusk. This balance has been disturbed.

You might ask: does not belief create reality? If I believe it is dawn, then it should be dawn. But apart from you, everyone else thinks it is dusk—so should it be based on you, or on the majority? Of course it is based on the majority. This is a very interesting point. The balance between personal reality and collective reality cannot be broken; if it is broken, you can no longer distinguish dreams from reality, or the subjective from the objective, and that can turn into paranoia or delusion.

Seth then goes on to describe how a paranoid person organizes his world:

The paranoid person organizes his psychological world according to his own obsession. He cuts away everything that does not fit, until everything conforms to his belief.

He cuts away all the reality that does not conform to his belief, and all the clues that remain point to only one thing—someone is after him. You tell him the facts, and he chops them all away, keeping only the part that supports his belief.

So how should we treat such a person? Seth says:

Just examine the sense data that have not been affected by his prejudice or obsession.

At this point you need to take him to examine the sense data that have not been affected by his obsession, and that will immediately bring him release. What is meant by sense data that have not been affected by his obsession? Let us go back to the earlier example: he was in a car accident and his leg was crushed—a violent physiological stimulus pulls him right back to reality in an instant. That kind of pain is not influenced by his fantasies or symbolism, and all at once it brings him back from that world of endless fear and fantasy into reality. This is a typical example.

In real life, we do not necessarily use this method. To put it simply, it means bringing him out of the world of his fantasy—but you can no longer change that world of his; he is stuck inside it, and to him that world is real. He fantasizes that someone is after him, and saying "no one is after you" is useless. You can shift his attention through other things—in areas where his obsession has not taken hold, give him correct sensory perception. When he discovers that he still has correct judgment in some areas, he may suddenly wake up: so it was my sensory perception that had a problem; that person was just making a phone call, that person was just going about his own business.

Do not argue with him about the very thing he is obsessed with, because you cannot persuade him that way. Change the angle, choose something in his sensory experience that is not affected by his obsession, give him some stimulation, have him exercise, do extreme activities, relax, enjoy good food, and when he feels safe, give him ways to shift his sensory attention. This method may be able to lead him away from that world of obsession.

This session is relatively short, and it deals with paranoia and delusion, which are not things we often encounter in everyday life. Perhaps we will rarely come across such things in the future, but if you ever do, you will know how such people think and where their problem lies. And this session emphasizes one very core thing—the delicate balance between personal reality and collective reality, between mind and matter. If that balance is broken or disrupted, we enter into some kind of paranoia. This is a very interesting session.

First, every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.

This is a French suggestion, from people who specialized in the study of suggestion, and it was very famous in the 1920s. In the early twentieth century, industrial society had achieved tremendous things, and everyone felt that this world, this society, and they themselves were all changing with each passing day and getting better and better. This may sound too optimistic, like comforting, pleasant nonsense. Many people think, is this not just chicken soup for the soul?

But to a certain degree, that suggestion was useful to countless people. It looks like chicken soup, like pleasant nonsense, but it really was useful to countless people. It is not a cure-all, and it cannot cure every illness. It did not help those who believed their own nature was basically untrustworthy, and it was not much help to those who did not trust themselves. But this suggestion is by no means empty posturing, nor is it useless chicken soup for the soul, because it can become a framework around which new beliefs gather.

So is this chicken soup useful? It is useful. Do not say that toxic chicken soup and pep talks are useless, and think you are so clever that you will not be fooled by such chicken soup. If you do not drink this bowl of chicken soup, then what are you drinking? If you think this bowl of chicken soup is poison, then what you are drinking is the real poison.

However, in our society today, people are often given the opposite suggestion: every day, in every way, I am getting worse and worse, and so is the world.

This kind of belief is extremely widespread right now. Think about it carefully: the expectations young people all over the world have for the future are not like those of the early twentieth century or even the mid-twentieth century, full of longing and hope for the American Dream and a happy life. Whether in Europe, America, or China, young people all show this phenomenon. Houses are getting taller and taller, but buying one through your own efforts is basically impossible. If a person cannot even satisfy the need for a place to settle down, he will not have any stable plans or considerations for the future.

As for society, we also feel that class has already solidified, and the gap between rich and poor will only keep widening. Looking at the past few decades, the rich have gotten richer and the poor have gotten poorer, and the channels through which the poor could turn their lives around have been cut off as well; there is no room to rise anymore. Add to that the pollution of the environment and the depletion of resources, and all of this is sending us one message: the future is getting worse and worse, not better and better.

Meditations That Seek Disaster

We have a kind of meditation that seeks disaster. We are hypnotizing ourselves, fantasizing that the future will get worse and worse. We have made many such films: The Day After Tomorrow, 2012, Armageddon, I Am Legend -- all end-of-the-world themes, depicting extremely miserable situations: humanity erupts in nuclear war, the earth is finished, and a few survivors barely hang on. And then there are the zombie themes -- shows like The Walking Dead have flooded the market over the past few years.

We no longer have the beautiful fantasies about the future that we used to have. Instead, we seem especially willing to fantasize about natural disasters, and major ones at that. Climate warming, the melting of the polar ice caps, rising sea levels, all coastal cities submerged; a great earthquake in the San Francisco and Los Angeles area; a huge earthquake in Japan; the Three Gorges Dam collapsing, and the people downstream suffering. It seems we are especially willing to fantasize about such disasters.

As we wished, we finally summoned a novel coronavirus that swept across the globe. We probably never imagined this one, but it really was more powerful than all the others. What disaster could press the pause button on the entire world economy? The novel coronavirus did it. So tell me, are people not bringing problems on themselves, fantasizing about these disasters day after day, until they finally wished it into being?

Then these beliefs will invite private and collective tragedies. The word "invite" means we invite the tragedy in, whether personal or collective. These beliefs are usually dressed in a polite outer garment acceptable to custom.

What is a polite outer garment acceptable to custom? Environmental organizations and green organizations preach every day that the earth is about to be finished, that it is so fragile that the last straw will cause the entire ecosystem to collapse. The oceans are full of plastic, and so on and so forth. Each organization puts forward an idea according to its own reasoning: the earth will be finished before long. It becomes something very lofty and fashionable. If someone does not care about environmental protection or green causes, they seem very low-class. Only by joining these organizations can one show that they are keeping pace with the times.

What are they actually doing? They are actually taking this belief that invites collective tragedy and dressing it in a lofty outer garment. The essence is the same.

He gives an example: in a certain war, perhaps thousands or tens of thousands of people died, and their deaths were almost accepted as a matter of course. These people were regarded as victims of the war, without question. But very few people ever consider that these people were actually victims of their own beliefs.

Since guns are quite real, bombs and war are also quite real.

What he means is that in modern wars, thousands and tens of thousands of people died in war, and we calmly accepted these deaths, thinking that in war people are bound to die. Then we mourned them and turned them into patriotic heroes. But no one ever considers that these people actually died for their own intentions, that they themselves wanted to be sacrificed.

Seth's viewpoint is utterly treasonous in patriotic eyes, and in the eyes of many people it simply cannot hold up. But do not forget that Seth looks at the issue from a standpoint beyond nations, beyond the whole of humanity, and even beyond the entire earth. He is not looking at this issue from the standpoint of any one nation or organization.

The enemy is obvious.

Of course, we can see the concrete enemy. During the War of Resistance against Japan it was the Japanese devils; later, during the Korean War, it was American imperialism; during World War II it was the fascist Axis powers -- Hitler, Germany, Italy, Japan³. The intentions of these enemies were surely evil.

War is basically an example of collective suicide.

Its fundamental nature is collective suicide. However, the people engaged in this kind of suicide carry all the trappings of war: organization, uniforms, troops, the meaning of war, the purpose of war, the justice of war. It is achieved through collective suggestion, through the great resources of the nation.

The people who push war forward all believe that the universe is unsafe, that they themselves cannot be trusted, and that strangers are always hostile. Since humanity is aggressive and warlike, you must strike first before you yourself are destroyed. These paranoid tendencies are mostly hidden under the banner of nationalism.

Seth always hits the nail on the head; he never hides anything. But from the perspective of humanity as a whole, these things are truly meaningless. We are all the same species, so what is the point of killing each other? For ideology, for national territory -- there is no real meaning. But if you are born in a certain country, this issue becomes a political issue, an issue of patriotism. Taking the wrong side becomes very serious; in some countries you can be arrested and thrown in prison on charges of treason, subversion of the state, and all sorts of other charges. But from Seth's perspective, these things are simply because they believe the world and the universe are evil, unreliable, and hostile. Rather than be destroyed, it is better to strike first.

And these are mostly hidden under the banner of nationalism.

The end can justify the means.

This is a statement Seth is extremely opposed to, one of the most harmful beliefs. Many people who wave the banner of nationalism, patriotism, and ethnic nationalism often say this. As long as the nation becomes strong and defeats the opponent, it does not matter how despicable the means are. This problem exists all over the world: using a self-proclaimed righteous purpose to carry out acts that destroy and trample upon humanity. I commit murder and robbery for a lofty and great goal -- is that normal? Because they are also enemies, so is there anything wrong with killing enemies?

He says that religious wars are always the tendency of paranoia.

There have been many religious wars in history, and they still exist today. The Middle East remains the most unstable region to this day: the confrontation surrounding Jerusalem among Israel, Palestine, and the Arab countries has many roots based in religion. Because fanatics are forever afraid of conflicting beliefs, and of systems that tolerate those beliefs. They allow only one belief, not two. If you challenge their belief, within their sphere of influence they will eliminate you first and be glad of it.

The most typical example is a French teacher who may have said some unfriendly words about Islam, and after school he was killed outside the school gate by an Islamic extremist⁴. A French teacher may have said some unfriendly words about Islam, and after school he was killed outside the school gate by an Islamic extremist⁴. There was also a French comic magazine that drew satirical cartoons, and the people involved were also put on wanted lists⁵. And then there was this French comic magazine that drew some cartoons, also satirizing the leader of Islam, and the people involved with this comic magazine were all put on wanted lists by various Islamic countries⁶. These people's beliefs do not allow any viewpoint to challenge them. Once one appears, the anger is such that the person must be silenced.

The Tragedy of Jonestown

Occasionally you have outbreaks of epidemics. Isn't one breaking out right now? Occasionally there are epidemics, and many people fall ill and die.

In part, these people are also victims of a belief.

Because they believe that the natural body is the natural prey of viruses and disease. They feel that the body can be infected by viruses at any time, that people are helpless against viruses and disease, and that their own resistance is not enough. This coronavirus has been portrayed as so terrifying, as though humanity has no resistance to it at all, except for the help that medicine can provide. The pervasive suggestion popular in the medical establishment emphasizes and exaggerates the fragility of our bodies, insisting that we must rely on the external medical system to safeguard the body, while downplaying the importance of the body's natural healing ability.

When a person, for his own reasons, is ready to die, only then does he die. No one dies without a reason. But it is not a reason of the ego consciousness; it is a reason of the inner self consciousness, the higher self consciousness.

Yet there is no one to teach people this. People do not recognize their own reasons for dying. He feels that it is all natural disasters, man-made calamities, wars, accidents. He does not feel that he himself wants to die. And no one has taught them the reasons for living.

From the time we are born, society, education, the nation, the entire human race, none of them tell us why people live. We have pursued this question since childhood, until adults time and again make us shut up, or give some self-contradictory, perfunctory explanations. In the end the child stops asking. He no longer asks, believing that this question has no solution, no correct answer. People do not know why they live, and can only live for goals instilled by parents or society: making money. In China right now "making money" and "eating" are extremely popular, reduced to the lowest level of material pursuit. There is no way around it. Because no one has told him why people live. So that is why he goes to die, because he has not recognized his own reasons for dying, and no one has taught him why he lives.

Life is an accident in a game of probability in the universe.

According to the current scientific context, life is an accident, a probability, an extremely coincidental possibility. So you cannot trust your own intentions, and you cannot trust your own intuition. You believe that your purpose in life must be to be something else or someone else, rather than to be yourself.

This sentence is very important. Because you cannot trust your own intuition, you spend your whole life being someone else, never being yourself. You are so-and-so's son, so-and-so's daughter, so-and-so's husband, so-and-so's wife, so-and-so's mother, so-and-so's father. These social identities and roles are draped over you like pieces of clothing; today you can wear this one, tomorrow that one. Take all the clothes off, which one is the real you? Do you dare to face it?

Many people use these identities as cover, to conceal the fact that they fundamentally cannot find their true self, afraid to face "I don't know who I really am." They put social masks on themselves, slap them on carelessly, go out every day like clowns to perform, and after performing long enough they come to believe it is real. They mistake the clothes for themselves; put on different clothes, and they feel they have found their identity. When you force him to take the clothes off, make him stand naked before a mirror and face himself, he does not dare.

In such circumstances, many people seek after isms.

Many people pursue this ism or that ism: socialism, communism, capitalism, liberalism, money-worship, all kinds of isms. The purpose of their following various isms is the hope of merging the purposes of those isms with their own unrecognized purposes. They want to use the purposes of isms to replace the meaning of life they have not found. Some people devote their whole lives to a certain ism, but when asked why, they cannot say. Beyond the many ordinary followers, there are also great people who get caught up in isms, giving their energy, resources, and support to these isms.

However, those people acknowledge the importance of their own existence.

Unlike ordinary followers, some people truly play a role within this ism, but they acknowledge their own importance. They do not subordinate their individuality beneath the ism; instead they rise above it, insisting on their individuality and becoming even more themselves. Through this ism, they become even more themselves, making themselves stronger; the ism is used by them.

Anyone who has lived in mainland China knows who it was that borrowed various isms and ultimately achieved himself, by then already greatly changed from the original face of that ism, or perhaps no longer that ism at all. But he used this ism, made use of this ism, to achieve his personal goals, so his individuality became even greater. The ism broadened his horizons, allowing him to transcend his former spiritual landscape. Driven by his own passion and vitality, curiosity and love, rather than fear, he carried the ism forward, and at the same time elevated himself even more, becoming even more himself.

Many people lost their lives in the recent tragedy of Jonestown in Guyana.

At their leader's command, they willingly took poison and died. More than 900 people died, with no army surrounding them, no bombs falling, no infectious virus, and no clothing to decorate the mechanism of the event. They were not short of money either. It was the 1970s, and the organization of more than 900 people still had about forty million or four million in its account⁷, a huge figure at the time, equivalent to a balance of several hundred million dollars today. But they killed themselves.

This event shook American society enormously at the time. American society could accept death in war, internal revolution, the War of Independence, the Civil War, but when more than 900 Americans committed mass suicide because of belief, because of following a certain person, without illness and without war, they could not accept it.

Those people were destroyed by an epidemic of belief, destroyed by a closed mental and physical environment. They bought a piece of land in Guyana in South America and built an isolated utopian home, with their own society and organization.

The villains — if there are villains truly responsible for the lives of these more than 900 people, what are they? They should include the following concepts. Examine yourself and see whether you have them:

First, the world is unsafe, and it is getting worse and worse.

Second, humanity itself is tainted by a fatal intent. People are always full of hostility toward others.

Third, the individual has no control over his own reality.

Fourth, social and societal conditions are themselves like fixed things, and their purposes directly contend against the fulfillment of the individual. Class solidification, people dividing into groups — all of it is dead, contending against what the individual wants to accomplish.

Finally, the end justifies the means. This one is deadly. As long as the goal is lofty enough, the means do not matter. And in this world, any action of a divine being is powerless. He does not believe in God, feels that God cannot solve problems, and that religion is also powerless and deceptive.

If the more than 900 people of Jonestown all held such beliefs, then when the leader said "let us kill ourselves," they felt it was acceptable. If society is getting worse and worse, and the future is getting bleaker, then living on seems meaningless, because they cannot see beauty or hope.

Those who died were all idealists, with an exaggerated perfectionism. They would rather be broken jade than whole tile. They wanted the best; if they could not attain it, they would rather have nothing at all, and die themselves. This perfectionism has less exaggerated forms of expression in real life. Their desire for the good was itself good; they wanted to seek the good. These people were idealists who went to South America wanting to build an ideal society for humanity. But their desire to seek the good was tainted and distorted by the beliefs mentioned above. Those beliefs would inevitably, gradually, remove from these people's experience their perception of the good. At the very beginning they were all good, but in the end they could no longer perceive true goodness. By the time he came to believe that the end justifies the means, it was already too late.

This touches on the difference between hostages and the rule of law. Modern Western society emphasizes the legitimacy of procedure, not the legitimacy of purpose. This is fundamentally different from people born or educated in mainland China. The West believes that procedural legitimacy is more important than the legitimacy of purpose. That is why many of us laugh at how pedantic and inflexible Europeans and Americans are about procedure and legitimacy. They think that as long as the reason is just, making some adjustments and modifications, even minor violations of the law, is no big deal; as long as the purpose is good, it is fine. This is a very dangerous signal. When he begins to do this, his perception of the good slowly shrinks smaller and smaller.

People are possessed of good intent.

When you see evil everywhere in people's intentions, in your own behavior and that of others, you will become an enemy to yourself and to your own kind. You yourself are good, but when you always see evil, wickedness, and bad deeds in yourself and others, over time you will treat yourself and your own kind as enemies. Looking at your phone and the news every day, it is all murder, arson, robbery, and plunder; then asking you to trust others and love others seems like a joke.

You concentrate on the gulf between the ideal and experience. Your ideal is toward the good, yet reality is evil everywhere. You keep focusing on this gulf until the gulf becomes the only reality. You will not see people's good intentions, and you will even mock those who do good deeds, thinking they are fools, that there is something wrong with their brains. Because compared with the ideal, the good in the world looks so small that it becomes a joke.

When you reach this point, your experience becomes closed, and you can only see evil.

These people are afraid of themselves. Why? Because they believe that all of humanity is evil. They themselves are also human, so they feel they cannot be trusted either. When conditions are right, they too will do bad things. The most fundamental original goodness of people is gone, replaced by the opposite belief: people are evil, even oneself. They also fear the content of life, fear being startled by their own true face, fear acting according to their own wishes.

This has nothing to do with whether one is educated or how high one's IQ is. Some people are uneducated but very kind; some people are educated but very evil.

They cooperated to create, making themselves the sacrificial victims of their dogma, system, or ritual. They expected the leader to act for them.

At a certain point, this leader absorbed their paranoia, until within him, the paranoia became an unstoppable force.

These people did not dare trust themselves, yet they trusted the leader. Isn't it strange? Isn't the leader also a person? They did not think so. They felt that the leader was a godlike existence; they themselves were not worthy of trust, but the leader could be trusted. Whatever the leader said, they did. They projected their own paranoia onto the leader, letting the leader act for them. In this process the leader absorbed their paranoia, turning it into an even more terrifying, unstoppable force. And this leader also became the victim of his followers; the followers created this leader, and also harmed this leader; just as his followers were also his victims.

People who have lived in mainland China and reflected on the experience of the Cultural Revolution will understand this problem. How the leader was pushed into that position by his followers, how the cult of personality was created. Mao Zedong himself had a lifetime of renown, leading the Chinese people to liberation, yet in the end he also met such a fate. He himself was also harming many followers, and was also harmed by his followers. They needed each other, achieved each other, but also harmed each other. Seth's way of looking at the problem is different from ordinary people's.

The Guyana incident was a small event, a small community of 900 people. But the nature is similar. You saw passionate Americans dying on a foreign shore, yet not dying beneath a war banner. If it had been for war, people could still accept it, because he had put on the disguise. But there was no war, and he died; this was a naked challenge to the limits of everyone's understanding.

They did not die in a bloody revolution, nor were they trapped in the hands of terrorists and killed as hostages. What you saw were Americans dying in a foreign land, dying of a certain belief. Those beliefs were beliefs peculiar to Americans, products of their own making. That is what frightened them. If more than 900 Americans could commit suicide, does that mean there are still many Americans with such tendencies? That these 900 people followed a leader and did such a thing means there may be a group of people in society who all hold such beliefs.

Beyond the list given earlier, there are also American-style beliefs. For example: money can solve almost all social issues. As long as there is money, the problems of poverty, race, and the wealth gap can all be solved. And that the middle-class lifestyle is the correct democratic way. Most Americans still hold this view to this day. Especially the problems between Black and white people can be solved by slapping on a social band-aid, rather than by attacking the basic beliefs behind the problems. Look at how conflicted Black-white relations were in the 1970s; reflecting on it today, the Black Lives Matter movement is in full swing, and the contradictions have not only not been resolved, they have intensified. Why? Because the core problem has not been solved. If you only solve surface problems and do not solve the beliefs behind the problems, it is useless. In a couple of days they will surface again.

Rootlessness Amid Plenty

Many young men and women had grown up in fine ranch houses in exclusive neighborhoods.

This was American society in the 1970s, when the hippie movement was in full swing, sexual liberation was mainstream, and smoking marijuana had become the norm. So what Seth saw then was not considered as serious as it would be today, but at the time it really was like that. These young people lived privileged lives. They were children of middle-class families, the finest products America could offer. They might never have had to work for a living, and they might have attended college. But they were the first to realize that such advantages did not necessarily enhance the quality of life.

They climbed to the peak of life, only to discover that this was not what they wanted. In the eyes of others, they were already winners in life, yet they themselves were lost. Their parents had worked hard to give them advantages, but when they grew up, they found those advantages useless: wealthy families, higher education, respectable jobs, comfortable incomes -- none of these could solve the problem of quality of life.

And the parents were baffled by their children's attitudes, thinking: the children have such good conditions, so why are they still confused, doing drugs, and being promiscuous? This is somewhat like the current situation in Chinese society: young people have better conditions than their parents' generation, yet they are more confused, and the parents do not understand why either.

But money and status are often the results of believing in the competitive nature of man.

If you pursue money and status as your life goal, that is because you believe in the competitive nature of man. If you did not believe in the competitive nature, there would be no need to pursue them. And this belief itself in turn destroys the very prizes it has produced.

Only after tasting the fruit do you realize it is not sweet. Only after you have tasted the lifestyle at the peak of life do you discover that it cannot improve the quality of life at all, cannot bring you happiness, and cannot give life greater meaning -- on the contrary, you become even more confused. Before you attain it, you think that having it will make you happy. Really? Suppose you had two billion in your account, drove a Rolls-Royce, and lived in a thousand-square-meter mansion -- what would you do when you got up the next morning? Many people say, let me earn it first, then we will talk. While pursuing the goal, they do not consider what comes after attaining it. Only after they attain it do they understand that the taste is not as sweet as they imagined.

There is scientific experimental evidence for this. They tried it: they tested the amount of excitatory hormones secreted in the brains of young people after buying a Lamborghini or Ferrari, a sports car costing hundreds of thousands of dollars; and they also tested the brain happiness of other people when they ate a favorite ice cream or meal. The final result was the same: the pleasure the brain gives a person who eats an ice cream they wanted is the same as that of a person who buys a sports car and drives it on the street⁸. They tested the amount of excitatory hormones secreted in the brains of young people after buying a Lamborghini or Ferrari, a sports car costing hundreds of thousands of dollars; and they also tested the brain happiness of other people when they ate a favorite ice cream or meal, and the final result was the same⁹. If one ice cream can do the job, why go through all that trouble for the other?

Many parents believed that the purpose of life was to make a great deal of money, and that virtue consisted of being respectable in society: the best car, house, and swimming pool. This was evidence that a person could survive in a cutthroat world. In this competitive society, I can come out on top, become someone above others, proving my ability and superiority. The premise is the belief that society is competitive.

But the children found it strange: these rich second-generation kids had lived in beautiful houses and driven luxury cars since birth, so why did they still have a restless stirring in their consciousness? Why the dissatisfaction? Could material things not satisfy them? They sensed those purposes, but what were they supposed to do about them? Some of their hearts were like a vacuum, waiting to be filled. Materially they were extremely satisfied, yet their hearts had become empty. Unlike people at the bottom who, in pursuing material things, had no time to think of anything else, their hearts were driven by desire and had nothing else in them. But these rich second-generation kids living in such an environment found their hearts empty instead. Because their parents had not taught them what meaning there was beyond these things, because the parents themselves did not know either.

They were seeking value in life, but at the same time they felt that they were the children of a tainted, bewildered tribe without clear goals.

Humanity as a whole also had no clear goal. What exactly is the goal of humanity, you might ask? According to mainstream society today, apart from reproducing, is there anything else? It is to make everyone happy. But how is happiness expressed? The American Dream: a house, a car, a respectable job. You do not need to tell me that -- every animal knows how to reproduce and continue life; ants and bees know it too. You have lived your whole lives, and you tell me the goal of life is just this? How do you expect young people to be convinced by you?

Then these young people began to try all sorts of different religions.

Because they could not get answers from their parents, they tried everywhere. At that time, Indian Zen Buddhism, Hinduism, and various other practices were especially popular in America, and they remain popular to this day. Because Christianity could not give them good explanations. They sought results from other religions.

Their earlier advantages seemed to demean them all the more. The affluent life not only failed to raise their happiness index, it actually diminished the meaning of life. Because they no longer needed to pursue the things that people at the bottom had to struggle their whole lives to obtain; they were born with them, and instead they could not find the meaning of life.

So Steve Jobs attended college for one year, then went to India to practice for a year¹⁰, which was a very popular thing to do at the time. Steve Jobs attended college for one year, then went to India to practice for a year¹¹. Do not think Jobs was so unusual -- in that era, going to study Indian or other religions was a fashionable thing.

Then they tried social programs. They found a strange sense of belonging with disadvantaged groups.

They began participating in social aid programs and found a strange sense of belonging with disadvantaged groups. They were clearly rich second-generation kids, yet they lived ascetic lives, became minimalists, and reduced their living needs to the minimum. In this minimalist life, they found joy and meaning in life. They devoted themselves to public welfare, environmental protection, and charity, and in this process they found belonging. Because the people they helped were also rootless. He felt that the poor had no roots in material terms and no roots in spiritual terms either; he himself had material roots, but spiritually he still had no roots. He felt that he too was a rootless person.

Thus the disadvantaged and the advantaged came together, and in a hopeless alliance they endowed a leader with a power he did not believe he possessed.

Among the more than nine hundred people in Jonestown, there were both social elites -- doctors, nurses, entrepreneurs -- and many people from the bottom of society. They gave their power to the leader, believing that the leader had power. If you have seen how Osho developed in America, you will find it very similar. Osho once built a utopian paradise in Oregon, and there is a documentary called The Wild Wild Country¹², called "Wild Wild Country," I think it is called "Wild Wild Country." The people who follow Osho to this day still fall into two broad categories: extremely wealthy social elites, including movie stars, sports stars, and big entrepreneurs; and homeless people living at the very bottom. They all found a sense of belonging in such groups.

Looking back at Buddhism, it is the same. Many big entrepreneurs, celebrities, and famous people have taken refuge, and there are also large numbers of poor people living at the bottom. They achieve resonance in such groups.

Seth found the root cause of these people: they were all rootless. One kind was rootless from poverty, the other rootless after becoming wealthy.

They finally withdrew from the world they knew into isolation. These elites and bottom-dwellers all ran from the familiar society into an isolated environment, isolated spiritually and isolated physically as well. They bought a piece of land in Guyana, built Jonestown, and governed themselves according to the American model, subject neither to Guyanese law nor to American law, but to their own management. And the leader's voice coming out of the loudspeakers was the amplified voice of their own combined voices.

In death, they accomplished their purpose.

They committed mass suicide and made a collective statement. That statement made Americans question the nature of their society, their religion, and their beliefs. So-called "normal" Americans began to reflect: what exactly had gone wrong with their social, religious, and political beliefs that caused more than nine hundred living human beings to disappear collectively? So this event was a tremendous shock to America. The deaths of these people were not without meaning.

After Seth said this, he paused for a long time. He said that each person had decided on their own to follow that path. Whether elite or bottom-dweller, they all had a collective purpose. Then he said, "unless you have questions," and the session ended.

Rob's Notes and Jane's Reaction

After the session ended, Rob noted that this session concluded at 10:19 p.m. on February 7, 1979. As soon as Jane came out of trance, she said she was still quite relaxed, with her right temple, knee, and foot all tingling and buzzing. Rob added that Jane's relaxed state enhanced the brilliance of the session.

Below are two of Rob's notes. The first note references the French therapist Emile Coue¹³, the one behind the phrase mentioned earlier: "Day by day, in every way, I am getting better and better." Emile Coue¹³ Coue was a pioneer in the study of suggestion, and in 1920 he wrote a book on suggestion that was very popular in Europe but not in the United States.¹⁴ In 1920 he wrote a book on suggestion, which was very popular in Europe but not in the United States¹⁵ Seth's knowledge is remarkably broad, directly citing a classic phrase from that era.

The second note says that Jane told Rob the Jonestown tragedy was an emotionally charged topic for her. That was why Seth had a long pause earlier; Seth could also feel the intensity of Jane's emotions on the matter. Rob said he was quite surprised, but Jane laughed and said: "Well, you never asked me."

Jane explained that the incident troubled her because the whole thing was an example of how a deranged megalomaniac, in the name of religion, led his followers to destruction. In Jane's own feelings, this touched on her own youthful conflicts with the Catholic Church. Jane was sent to Catholic schools as a child, and a child studying in a strict Catholic school had tremendous conflicts with that religion. How could a child resist such a large religious institution? So at the age of eighteen she gave up organized religion and cut ties with Catholicism. At the age of eighteen she gave up organized religion¹⁶

Jane also had an unshakable feeling: she opposed using the Seth material as the basis for any kind of cult. Jane detested personality cults and fanaticism to the core of her being. She feared people saying, "You are the one channeling Seth, so we revolve around you, worship you, and whatever you say goes." So she continued to examine Seth's revelatory material, and herself, with an extremely rigorous eye.

Seth's choice of Jane for this work was purposeful. If it were not for Jane's somewhat extreme convictions, the Seth material could easily have become another religion, another cult, another deification movement. A person who comes from a higher dimension, who grasps the truth of the world, and who can connect with Seth at any time -- if such a person existed in the world, producing books for over twenty years, there would inevitably be many followers. But Jane was particularly averse to and disgusted by this sort of thing. She did not allow others to worship Seth, nor did she allow others to worship her.

She constantly checked and reminded herself not to turn the Seth material into the material of a madman who leads people astray. Religious fanaticism frightened her, because she believed it was only slightly better than fundamentalism, just a small step ahead. Here one can look at Session 829, where Seth discusses evolution and some material on fundamentalism.

When I asked Jane why she had not told me earlier about her feelings regarding Jonestown, Jane laughed and said: "Well, you never asked me." She added that she was not trying to keep it secret; she simply accepted her attitude as something built on her own strong beliefs.

The mass deaths at Jonestown occurred in November 1978¹⁷, which happened to fall within the period when we were not dictating this book. There was a gap of about nine months, nearly ten months, during which no book dictation was done, and the event occurred right in the middle of that period. The mass deaths at Jonestown occurred in November 1978¹⁸ But Seth almost immediately began discussing the matter in private material, just as Jane described in Session 830. Now Jane told me that Seth's way of introducing the topic made it easier for her to discuss it in this book. Without the groundwork Seth laid in private sessions, Jane would have worried that her own excessive emotional involvement during the transmission might distort the material. So Seth laid the groundwork, having already discussed the Jonestown matter several times in private sessions, which defused Jane's emotional reactions on the subject.

Because later Seth would mention this case several more times. The Jonestown incident occurred in November 1978, and at this point it was February 1979, only two or three months later, when the event was at its most intense in public discourse. More specific details about Jonestown will come later.

The True Role of Viruses

This section will be rather long, and it is very important. I think some people, after listening to this lesson, may directly become enlightened. But others may not necessarily; I will do my best to explain it clearly. If any of you have paper and pen, it is best to have them ready, and as I go along, you can write and draw, which will help you understand more thoroughly and deeply. Let us look at this: the content may seem plain and unremarkable, but it contains very profound truths.

Let us look at the beginning first. After Seth delivered Session 835, five weeks passed in between, and during that time Seth also delivered four sessions; the last three sessions were prompted by the accidental death of their kitten named Billy on February 28.

First, after Session 835 on February 12, Jane and Rob received the proof copy of Volume 2 of The "Unknown" Reality, and comparing the 499-page manuscript word by word against the original occupied all their energy for the following thirteen days. In thirteen days he corrected a 500-page book word by word. But when I got up on the morning of February 26, early in the morning I wrapped up the manuscript and wanted to mail it, and then I noticed that Billy seemed a little unwell. So I went to the post office to mail the package, and Jane looked after him. But when I came back, Billy had not improved, and as the morning wore on, we discovered he had a urinary problem. That afternoon, I took him to the vet, and the vet kept Billy for treatment; the problem was quite serious, and by that time the cat was already in a lot of pain. A urinary problem, possibly unable to urinate; many kittens have this kind of illness.

Jane and I both found it very strange: why Billy? Why would such a seemingly perfect young little creature fall ill for no apparent reason? Without a doubt, he said, we were shocked. Then, in Session 836, during the private session Jane gave that night, Seth discussed Billy's illness, the little cat's illness, and at the same time gave me the first part of an answer to a question I had long had. What question? He was curious about the connection between the host, whether human, animal, or plant, and the disease it contracts. Actually, Rob had always been quite interested in this question, that is, the relationship between us and the small animals or small plants we keep, the connection between the person and the host in terms of illness.

He said the illness should be said to be caused by, for example, a kind of virus, and then, in my notes for this piece, I will return to this question again at the end. It looks like a lot of rambling at the beginning, talking about his cat's illness; everyone, do not be impatient, he will soon begin to unfold the content that follows.

On Tuesday, the vet called to tell us Billy was better, and that perhaps we could bring him home the next afternoon, that is, Wednesday afternoon. But before driving all the way across town to pick him up, it would be best to call first. Then on Wednesday afternoon, one hour before I was supposed to call and check, the phone rang, and naturally the thought flashed through my mind that it must be the vet's name, and sure enough it was him calling. He explained with regret that Billy had died an hour earlier. The vet had left the office to make a phone call, but when he came back, he found Billy dead in the cage. He did not know why the cat had died; the vet did not know either. We truly felt terrible.

That is to say, from the doctor's perspective, the cat should not have died. The fact that he did not know why it died means that, from the vet's perspective, the cat's physical and physiological functions were not yet at the point of death. But that night Jane insisted on holding Session 837 anyway; our lives had to go on.

On March 2, a good friend brought them two six-week-old kittens just taken from a nearby farm. Jane and I immediately named them Billy the Second, and the other one Mickey. Billy the Second, clearly, was also a tiger cat, a tabby cat, and looked very much like the deceased Billy. Mickey's black-and-white long fur immediately reminded me of our childhood neighbor's cat. These two cats had lived in a barn that specialized in caring for animals, and they were so shy that they hid in the living room sofa for several days. During this period, we were both busy with proofreading the book.

Then, on the evening of Wednesday, March 5, Jane held Session 839; she held this session.

As for my question about viruses, I wrote in Session 836 about what the true relationship is between host and disease. I misspoke earlier; the host is not that relationship; the host refers to the relationship between the virus and the person. Because a virus is an entity that lives parasitically within human cells; it needs cells as its host. Without cells as a host, the virus cannot live, nor can it reproduce. It refers to this relationship, that is, the relationship between the virus and the host, and what exactly the relationship with disease is.

Recently, Jane and I talked about the World Health Organization's announcement earlier this month that smallpox had apparently been eradicated¹⁹. The smallpox vaccine is now gone, and it is strange whether this disease has truly been eliminated, or whether smallpox might appear again, for example, ten years from now. I have said to Jane more than once that if smallpox could think as we do, then smallpox would not consider itself bad, or a terrible disease, or a scourge. If it is so terrible, then why did it exist in our natural world in the first place? Within the full equipment of life forms, that is, among all the possibilities of all life forms, among all living things, what is the role of the smallpox virus?

Will this disease one day return to our reality from the possibilities it occupies? That is the question we just mentioned, the relationship between virus and host that he has been discussing. And so it would seem to be reborn. If that were the case, what would we humans say? We would say, was it not eradicated? How did it come out again? The reappearance of smallpox would undoubtedly be rationalized, and then scientists would say that it must have hidden in some unsurveyed area among human populations, or that it is a mutation, and somehow a closely related animal virus evolved into smallpox. This is a reason we often use; you see, they always blame animals; even back then they started blaming viruses. When many viruses cannot be explained as to why they break out again, they blame it on animals.

Actually, in much recent news everyone can see this too: many ancient Siberian viruses may be discovered again. Under the Antarctic, because of warming weather, some viruses beneath the permafrost may also become active. Even in ancient Africa, some viruses that have long been extinct may sweep back again. Including last year in China, even something like the anthrax virus, which had been gone for decades, one or two individual cases were found in a certain place in the northeast; the anthrax virus seemed to have returned as well. Actually, we occasionally see this kind of thing in the news.

Session 840

And in that same session, among other things, Seth gave an answer to my question. Here is what Seth said:

Any kind of virus is important to the stability of life on your planet. This point is crucial, and you should not think of viruses as bad. It exists within the life system of this planet, and it is important. It is important to the stability of our planet. They are part of the heritage and memory of this planet. Even if at any given time you were to eliminate every molecule of any kind of virus, you still could not eliminate that virus. You cannot eliminate it. They exist within the memory of the Earth, and at any time, if there is a need, it will be recreated.

Very interesting, isn't it? Just as they came before, that is how they came before, and that is how they come. And this also applies to any animal or plant considered to be known as extinct. We think a certain animal has gone extinct, a certain plant has disappeared, but he says actually none of them have. They also exist within the memory of the Earth, and when needed, they will appear again.

Only a being like humans, whose consciousness has been tuned to objectified awareness, that is, materialized awareness -- we humans have all tuned our consciousness to this materialized state of awareness -- only such a being would imagine that the physical destruction of a species destroys its existence. Only we humans would believe that in order to eliminate something, you destroy it physically, and once you have destroyed it physically, it no longer exists. For example, with a virus, we kill all the molecules of the virus, and then the virus no longer exists. This is human thinking from a material perspective. In fact, this viewpoint is fundamentally wrong, because matter is not the determining factor at all. The thing behind it is what determines.

In the following three private sessions, although Seth was mainly discussing Billy's death, tonight he spoke more explicitly. Although he did not call Session 840 a session related to this book, we still placed it in a section and put it in this book, because this material fits with the theme of this book. That is what he thought. But actually, let me first say whether this session should be placed in this book or in this section. Personally, I feel it is not really very suitable. But it is more suitable for Part One, where Seth, in the first part of this book, talked a lot about issues related to viruses. If he talked about viruses, that part does indeed have this content, but in this section, the content he discusses later is no longer very closely related to this book.

Let us first take a look. This part can be considered equivalent to the discussion of infectious diseases in Part One. You may remember that in the first part of this book, he talked a lot about epidemics, plagues, and infectious diseases. There, he briefly mentioned some things about viruses, but he did not expand on them. This session is where he focuses on the issue of viruses, and it is also very relevant to the pandemic we are currently facing.

During the pandemic last year, when it had not yet broken out in the United States but was already very serious in China, I made a video about viewing this virus from the perspective of higher-dimensional consciousness. I made four episodes at that time. In those four episodes, I gathered together all of Seth's content about viruses, and I compiled everything about viruses, diseases, and epidemics from several books. Actually, it was mainly based on this book, because this book focuses on epidemics, mass events, and plagues. This session is actually already included in that content, but many people may not have seen that part, so I will go through it again.

This latter part is basically not difficult, so I can go through it quickly. He mainly states some facts, and there is no difficulty in understanding them. The difficult parts come later. Let us first look at the earlier part. Seth begins by saying, very powerfully:

Without viruses, you could not live. And the biological world as you know it would not exist.

With this statement, Seth makes clear from the very beginning the value of viruses, or their position in the existence of humanity or of this Earth. Without viruses, there would be no humans, and even less would there be all the living beings in this world. So are viruses important or not? Are viruses bad or good? From this angle, how can you easily reach a conclusion? We are so afraid of viruses every day, aren't we? Our hand sanitizers, our disinfectant wipes, all these things tell you they can kill 99.99% of viruses -- all viruses, not just one kind, all viruses, at that rate. But if one day we humans really invented something that could eliminate all viruses on the entire Earth, do you think we humans would do such a foolish thing? Hard to say. If science continues to develop along this path, it is really possible. They would say, we have invented this kind of thing, and just like disinfectant wipes, we can spread a substance in the atmosphere that can kill 99% of all viruses on this planet. I think if scientists were really foolish enough to go that far, it would be terrifying. Because without viruses, we humans could not survive, and the entire biological world would cease to exist. That is how great the role of viruses is.

Then he continues:

Viruses appear to be the villains.

We tend to see viruses as villains. Generally speaking, that is because you think of them separately. For example, you divide viruses into many categories, saying they are smallpox viruses, or various others like the current COVID-19 virus, the novel coronavirus, including the earlier SARS virus. So you think this virus is bad, this virus is deadly, and therefore you conclude that viruses are all bad. Because the good viruses, you do not even know about them. You do not even know their names. You do not know what they are called. The ones you know are all these deadly, very bad viruses. Therefore, because of this viewpoint, you think all viruses are bad.

However, there is an overall connection in which all viruses participate. He says that behind viruses there is an overall family of viruses, or an overall conscious connection among viruses, or that all viruses, as a category of beings, have a general connection. This general connection is essentially very good. It serves to protect and stabilize the life of the entire Earth and of humanity.

But you might say, that is not right. Then why are there those deadly viruses? Keep reading:

The delicate balance is biologically maintained.

That is, the balance, the delicate balance, is maintained by the biological world. Therefore, it will not break out. That is, all viruses -- for example, this virus, the smallpox virus, the measles virus, all kinds of viruses -- behind all these viruses there is an overall connection, an inner connection. This inner connection maintains balance with the entire biological world. They are maintained biologically. What "biologically maintained" means is that, first, at a higher level, they form a union, and then at the biological level, biologically, they maintain a kind of balance.

Every body contains countless viruses. Our bodies are full of viruses everywhere. If you have time, you can look it up: viruses are everywhere in our bodies. And at any given time, at a particular time, and under certain conditions, they can be deadly. That is, our bodies always carry viruses that can be deadly. So it must be that under certain conditions and at certain times, a virus can suddenly become deadly. So we all carry deadly viruses, so there is no need to worry.

To put it as simply as I can, these viruses within the body take turns playing active or inactive roles according to the overall condition of the body. That is, the human body contains many, many viruses, and according to the body's needs, at certain specific times, some viruses are active and some are inactive, as if they did not exist. Inactive means they are latent there, not active at all. At certain stages, they are deadly viruses, and at other stages, they are not deadly viruses. And in those later stages, they react biologically in quite beneficial ways. This refers to viruses. When viruses are in their beneficial phase, they react biologically in quite beneficial ways.

Bringing about the necessary alterations in any cellular activity that adds to the body's stability, which in turn triggers other cellular alterations that are equally beneficial.

Regarding this passage, let me briefly describe it. Because after I posted that video last year, not long after, about a month or so later, someone left a comment below it. He said, I am a virus researcher. I am at some university in the United States, a scholar at a research institute in America, and he is a Chinese speaker. Then he left a comment saying, I watched your video about viewing viruses from the perspective of higher-dimensional consciousness. At that time, I also read the text as subtitles along with it. He said, when I saw this passage, it was especially amazing. Which passage? The one I just read, about how every person carries viruses, how viruses are latent, how they are active for a period and inactive for a period, taking turns. When they are active and when they are not, and when they are active, most of the time they are beneficial to the human body, they are good, their benefits, and so on. That passage, the one I just read. He said, what I do not understand is how Seth knew these things in 1979. He said these things may not have been known to humanity at that time, but he said it was only in 2014 or 2015 that virology first came to recognize what Seth said in 1979.

That is, within many of our human gene segments, within the gene segments of our DNA, there are many segments that are exactly the same as viruses. A virus is also a segment of DNA. Remember, a virus is just a segment of DNA, or some are a segment of RNA. It is single-stranded, and some are double-stranded. Double-stranded is called DNA, single-stranded is called RNA. Whatever we call it, it is very similar to our gene segments. In fact, within our gene segments, there are segments exactly identical to the encoding of this virus. So he said, why did scientists only discover these things in 2014 or 2015, when Seth already knew them in 1979? So he found it especially amazing and admirable. Seth was completely right. It really is like that.

In recent years, that is, in the research of the 2010s, people discovered that these viruses, certain viruses or many viruses, play a crucial role when human body cells undergo transformation. Remember, when some cells in the human body undergo transformation, for example, changing from one type of cell to another type of cell, because starting from the earliest primitive cells, each cell differentiates and specializes, and so on. We will not go into that. Biology explains it in great detail, including how differentiation emerges from stem cells, and so on and so forth. We will not study such detailed biological issues. Let us keep it simple. So without the participation of these viruses, he said, human cells could not complete this transformation work, this action, in the process of transformation. If they could not complete this cellular transformation, human life could not continue. That cellular transformation, in many respects, in many cases, is a crucial transformation that must occur. It is a necessary process for the continuation of life.

So he said, how could Seth know this? It is amazing. What Seth said is exactly the same thing. And then these same cellular transformations in turn bring about other things, and trigger further changes. You see, it leads to some cellular transformations, and it also adds to the necessary alterations in any cellular activity that adds to the body's stability. You see, first, cellular activity undergoes necessary alterations, but because of the existence of viruses, this stability is enhanced. Otherwise, these cellular alterations might bring about great disaster. But because of the existence of these or certain viruses, the cellular transformation is very stable and does not go wrong. Amazing, isn't it? And this alteration in cellular activity in turn influences or triggers other equally beneficial chain reactions of cellular transformation. This is also very interesting.

He gives an example from another area, from another angle. For example, toxic substances, such as belladonna, can be quite deadly. But people have long known that small doses of belladonna are helpful to a sick body. This is a very interesting passage, isn't it? Many people do not know what belladonna is, so I have found some introductory material about belladonna for everyone. Let us take a look.

First, belladonna is highly toxic. The whole plant is poisonous, and its most toxic parts are its roots and rhizomes. The whole plant is toxic: its seeds, its flowers, its branches and leaves, and the oily substance secreted on its leaves are all poisonous. But what is very interesting is that it says the fruit is sweet. The fruit is sweet, but it contains deadly poison. Note several points here: it absolutely must not be used. Then it says that in Spanish, belladonna has another name, and in Italian it has another name. It originates from Italian, and its original meaning is "beautiful woman." Why? Because in ancient times, people would take the extract of belladonna, using a very small amount, a very, very small portion, and drop it onto a woman's pupils, producing a dilating effect. So the colored contact lenses that women wear today -- in ancient times, people used this more powerful method of directly dilating the pupils, making a woman's two pupils enlarge and appear dark and deep, very beautiful. This was used in ancient times.

You can see its fruit. Its flower has five petals, and below are its seeds. Its fruit is a black ball, and inside this black ball are these small seeds. I am showing everyone so that if you are out in the wild and happen to encounter this thing, you absolutely must not eat it. It is deadly poison.

Then let me tell you the interesting parts about it. Let us pick out the interesting parts to show everyone. In small amounts, it can be used as medicine. It can be used medicinally. In some cases, a small amount is taken, and common preparations include belladonna tincture, belladonna liquid extract, or belladonna extract. This is a medicine. It is mainly used to treat stomach spasms or muscle spasms. This medicine is mainly important for muscle spasms. Our stomach spasms -- the stomach also contains muscles, and these muscle spasms can sometimes be very severe, including duodenal ulcers and so on, biliary colic. Biliary colic is also those contractions in the gallbladder that are similar to muscles, and so on.

Perhaps the most interesting part is this: belladonna -- cats and dogs, if cats and dogs eat it, they will also be poisoned. Cats and dogs will be poisoned if they eat it. But for most animals, such as rabbits, birds, deer, and most other animals, they will not be poisoned by eating belladonna. Interesting, isn't it? They can eat it without being poisoned. Cats and dogs will be poisoned, and of course humans will also be poisoned if they eat it. What is even more interesting is that a person does not eat belladonna, but eats an animal that has eaten belladonna. For example, a little rabbit eats belladonna, and then a person shoots the wild rabbit and eats the rabbit meat. The person will also be poisoned from eating the rabbit meat, while the rabbit itself is not poisoned. They are all animals, so why is the difference between rabbits and cats and dogs that cats and dogs will be poisoned? Isn't that interesting? Think about it carefully: cats and dogs are domesticated by humans and have become human pets, so they have picked up human habits. Very interesting, isn't it? So regarding belladonna, when I saw this, I wanted to show everyone. For other animals, it is harmless. Animals that do not live with humans, wild animals, can eat belladonna without any problem. They simply do not react. So this is a very interesting matter.

All right, let us return to our session. Let us insert this bit of popular science about belladonna. Let us continue.

The Social Cooperation of Viruses and the Triggering of Lethal Effects

He says that these viruses in the body live a kind of social, cooperative life. This is very interesting, isn't it? Viruses have social, cooperative lives. Viruses even have a society, they even have social activities. See, isn't this different from what we thought? We think viruses are lifeless, right? Of course viruses are alive, I can't say they're lifeless. Because in scientific definitions, people often don't know how to define viruses. If you say they're alive, they're not even a cell. They're different from bacteria, they don't even have a cell. They're just a fragment of DNA, wrapped in a protein membrane, that's all. If you say they're not alive, they are living. It's very interesting. After it enters the human body, on its host—the host is the cell, the cell is the virus's host—it produces reactions. So Rob said the Seth material answered his questions about the relationship between host and virus, host and disease.

And regarding their effects, let's continue. This virus is very interesting, completely different from what we think. The virus lives—see, he actually used the word "lives," just like people, just as we have social lives, it also has social cooperation and life. Their effects only become lethal under certain conditions. Their effects refer to whether they are lethal or not. Their lethal effects are only activated under certain conditions, and at that time the virus must be triggered into destructive activity. The virus is triggered, begins to enter destructiveness, showing its destructive side. And this only happens at a certain point, this only happens at a certain point.

What point? How is this point triggered? It is when the person involved, this person, actively seeks death or a biological crisis situation. When the person wants to die or wants to be sick, the virus's destructive or lethal function is activated. But many people say no one wants to die. What we're talking about is still actively seeking. The person actively seeks, not referring to the person's conscious mind, but referring to their inner subconscious, or the deeper inner self's consciousness, which they themselves do not know. When their inner self wants to die, this virus is activated and becomes a tool to kill themselves.

In such cases, the initial infection is always emotional and spiritual.

You see, in such cases, not all cases. He is talking about this kind of case, that is, when some people want to die, this kind of spiritual or emotional infection occurs. So infection is not only biological. We think all infections are biological—you're exposed to a viral environment, and so on. Of course that is also true. But he says the initial infection is spiritual and emotional. Usually, he is referring to this kind of situation. Don't misuse it. You can't say all viral transmission is like this. It isn't. He has a premise: in this kind of situation, which kind? The kind where the person wants to die or wants to be sick.

That usually involves a social situation, so there are certain social reasons, social circumstances. Therefore, if a person, for example, is at the lower levels of a poor social environment, living at the bottom of society, or in an environment where their personal value as a member of society is severely diminished, they will become a possible victim. Very interesting. When a person feels their value has been severely diminished, or when they live at the bottom of society, they cannot see hope for survival. Their life is truly already very difficult. Whether economically or in terms of social status, they cannot see a beautiful future ahead. So at such times, often a plague or an epidemic will take the lives of many of these people at the bottom of society. Seth believes that they themselves want to leave.

He says:

Now, a member of such a society may first show feelings of dissatisfaction.

In this society, such a person may first become dissatisfied, very hot-tempered, very irritable, often erupting, or engaging in antisocial behavior. This has certain characteristic features. Therefore, in the same way, such a person may conversely trigger the virus.

What he means is that if a person appears in society, what should they show? Feelings of dissatisfaction, complaining, losing their temper, erupting, engaging in antisocial behavior. If they vent in this way, then it's fine. Although this is also not good for society—not good for social stability, unity, and harmony—it will not lead to more serious consequences. He says, in the same way, this person, conversely. What does conversely mean? It means they don't do the above things. That is, such a person living at the bottom, who does not resist, does not lose their temper, does not erupt, does not engage in antisocial behavior, such as street protests and so on, will bottle it up until it becomes a virus. This viewpoint Seth raised is something many people never thought of. So they can trigger the virus. It would be better to let them release it.

Disrupting their biological social order.

"Their" refers to the viruses. He says viruses in the human body are like a small society. They have a stable social order, they live a social life. But this kind of personal social powerlessness—living at the bottom, feeling one's value severely diminished—such a person will affect the biological social order of the viruses. The reason is here. These emotions in their body will cause the very stable social order of the viruses to be disrupted. So under such conditions, at such a point, the viruses show their lethal side. Therefore, some of them immediately become lethal. Some of them, immediately—he used the word "immediately"—immediately become lethal, or go out of control, completely out of control or lethal.

Therefore, of course, the resulting disease becomes contagious.

Because viruses themselves are contagious. The modes of transmission vary—some through contact, some through droplets, and so on—but they become contagious. When it reaches that degree, the degree of being contagious, this becomes a social disease. This single, certain group of people's, individually triggered virus-caused transmission becomes a social disease.

Now think about it. I discussed similar issues in the first chapter of this book. Our entire society's regional pursuit of materialization has actually already reached a point where no hope can be seen. Whether through rational analysis, or through feeling, or through objective facts, if all of humanity treats material pursuit as the only goal of human pursuit, then no hope can be seen. This result—anyone with a brain and intelligence can think of it—it ultimately has one result, which is this. So the deep-level reason is fundamentally that our current social system and social institutions, or economic system, all have problems. For example, our wealth gap is actually getting larger and larger, and so on.

In the middle of this, Adam Smith actually played a very bad role. Although in the early period, the viewpoints in his The Wealth of Nations²⁰ were effective. Their effectiveness—he pointed out that within the cooperative units of the whole society, as long as each person pursues the maximization of their personal interests, then the interests of the whole society are maximized. Each person only needs to consider themselves. You don't need to consider others. You don't need to pretend to be altruistic, or utilitarian, or do charity. Don't talk about all that useless stuff. You just need to consider yourself. If you do well for yourself, if you live well yourself, the whole society will be fine. What he said seems reasonable. If everyone has money, then society has money. If everyone is prosperous, then society is prosperous. If everyone is happy, then society is happy. It seems very reasonable, yes, seemingly flawless. But the premise is based on what state was he in? He was in the environment that England was in at that time. The early industrialization of that time, or even an environment not yet fully industrialized, when handicrafts and commerce were just beginning to sprout. At that time, people still used traditional business models, and everyone was familiar with and knew each other. Everyone had a shop—whether a blacksmith, a tailor, a baker, or a butcher—many of them passed down through generations, a business model where sons inherited their fathers' trades. Under such a broad premise, there was a basic precondition: there was a broad social connection between people.

So what he called everyone for themselves—he did not pay attention to, or he ignored, a more core issue: these people lived in a society, a community, or a community of shared interests. This was not so obvious, and he also selectively ignored it. He deliberately ignored it, while emphasizing those things in The Wealth of Nations²⁰.

But what was the result? The result is the society we see today. If we use human body cells as an analogy, what principle is it? If every cell only considers itself, only pursues its own development and reproduction, endlessly multiplying, taking all nutrients for itself, then what is it doing? What do we call such cells? It doesn't care whether others live or die, as long as it lives well itself. You might say this sounds right—each cell just needs to live well itself. But if it doesn't consider others and only considers itself, taking all nutrients for itself, endlessly reproducing itself, then this kind of cell is a cancer cell.

And our society, in its later stages, at the mature stage of industrialization, into post-industrialization, into today's internet and globalized economy, people simply don't know each other. We have not established a common social framework. Without such a basic, common community condition between people, business is global. You sell your things all over the world. You don't know your customers at all. You don't know who is buying your things. At this time, the idea of everyone for themselves has been brought to its extreme. Brought to its extreme, the underlying social foundation that constrained it no longer exists. Then it is purely profiting for profit's sake. It has even been written into corporate law, becoming a law. If a company does not make money for its shareholders, the company's management team and managers are subject to legal punishment. This is not a joke. That is to say, as a company's executive—CEO, general manager, whatever—if your main goal is not to make money for shareholders, if you donate all the money to society, to charities, or do public welfare, or make contributions to the community, these shareholders can legally sue you, and you must bear legal responsibility, because you did not put shareholders' interests first. This is not a joke. In the corporate laws of various countries, there are similar statements. This is a law.

So in this situation, it has led to what we see today: those cancer-cell-like large companies, large conglomerates, large chain organizations, large institutions, everywhere. They are just like cancer cells, absorbing the wealth, energy, and resources of all other people in the whole society, even the whole world, who have no ability to resist them. They are exactly like cancer cells. The more they are fought, the stronger their absorptive capacity becomes. Others' ability to resist and fight them becomes weaker and weaker. They expand without limit. Look at companies today—they are already richer than countries, even richer than several countries. Companies today are often like this. So it has reached this kind of situation.

So I just used this phenomenon as an example for everyone. It is an example. If you don't consider the people at the bottom of society, if you don't consider them, if you let them fend for themselves, let them be leeks, harvesting them crop after crop—they have no way to resist you, and they have no way to shake your foundations. But biologically speaking, they have already destroyed the social foundation of our human life. Isn't the principle the same? It is the same. When the stability of this social foundation is destroyed, when the biological stable social order is destroyed, those things that were originally non-toxic or non-lethal will become lethal viruses, and they will be contagious.

This is the fundamental, deep-level reason for the novel coronavirus that spread globally from 2019 to 2020, and still has not been resolved as of 2021. If these problems cannot be solved, if the problems cannot be changed, then this virus will coexist with us for a long time. We can only fundamentally solve it. Solve what? Solve the problem of no longer taking material pursuit as the core, solve the problem of no longer taking corporate profit as the main purpose. We can jointly build an autonomous, self-governing, altruistic, mutually helping social system. Only this can fundamentally reverse and solve this problem. This is the core and the key.

Then he says:

This is not to say that one virus suddenly turns destructive.

That's not what it means. He would rather say:

The entire cooperative structure in which all viruses are involved becomes unsafe and threatened.

What he means is, don't think that a certain virus suddenly becomes lethal while other viruses are fine. He says this is not right, it's not like that. Don't understand it that way. He says it is the entire virus—remember, the entire virus—the social cooperative structure in which all viruses exist together that becomes unsafe, becomes threatened. Then it will naturally, in such an extreme way, by making itself lethal, strike back, correct, and change.

To put it more bluntly: you pursue material things, right? Then I'll just make your entire human economic life come to a halt, won't that do? You all stay home and rest. Think carefully about whether pursuing the spiritual is more important or pursuing the material is more important. You might say for thousands of years—not thousands of years, for this period of time. Before a thousand years ago, there were still religious beliefs, and there were also times when people pursued many other spiritual things. Let's just talk about modern times. In modern times, we have taken the pursuit of material interests as the main goal of life, society, and human development. Then won't you lead to such a result? Haven't you threatened the structural stability of this overall existence? If you threaten its stability, it will make itself threatening.

On this issue, I think Seth actually emphasized this viewpoint again. He says he told you in Session 836 that viruses mutate. First understand, it's not that a certain virus suddenly mutates and becomes lethal. It is that the environment in which the entire virus exists has changed, which causes this lethal change within the entire viral system. Here you must understand and distinguish. It's not that a certain virus suddenly turned bad. It is that the larger environment, the social environment in which the entire virus lives, has turned bad, has been destroyed.

He says:

The situation is often like this.

He says viruses mutate, he says this often happens. That is, viruses mutate. This is very interesting. This is also where our human society has been helpless in facing this novel coronavirus. You just invented a vaccine, and it mutates again. What can you do? Although our scientists tell us the vaccine is still effective, you still feel uneasy in your heart, because the speed of vaccine development sometimes cannot keep up with the speed of viral mutation.

He says:

To believe in vaccination against such dangerous diseases seems quite scientific.

Scientists have always told us this. And undoubtedly, scientifically speaking, vaccination seems effective. He says it is indeed effective. He says you can't deny this, because from a scientific perspective, the vaccine does have an inhibitory effect on this virus, especially for contagious infectious viruses. Right, especially recently. Look at the United States—I don't know about Europe, it may also be declining—the daily number of confirmed cases is dropping sharply. From hundreds of thousands per day—at the peak in the United States, daily confirmed cases reached hundreds of thousands, four to five hundred thousand²¹ at the highest peak—now it has returned to tens of thousands per day. Although the numbers are still high, compared to hundreds of thousands per day, it has already dropped a lot. I haven't looked at this data recently. It's been a long time since I looked. I don't know the specifics.

For example, he says this virus mutates. He tells you—what he means is that after you get vaccinated, it seems the virus has quieted down, been subdued by you, been solved. But you have destroyed the entire existence of the virus—such a—

The Social Nature of Viruses and Belief Systems

Seth says that if you kill off a particular virus, or if you get COVID under control this year, that does not mean the problem is solved. If you destroy the overall cooperative structure in which the virus exists, making it unsafe and threatened, it will definitely fight back. The virus's resistance mechanism is to turn itself lethal. He says that if you do not address the root of the problem, then a couple of years later a new virus may emerge again. You only see the virus; you do not see the deeper social factors and social causes behind the virus.

For example, in your era, people no longer get smallpox. Those cultures once believed that disease was caused by demons, and shamans would try to drive the demons out of the body. Yet this method seemed to work too -- if every shaman were a fraud, who would pay him to come treat an illness? That belief system was tightly knit and widely accepted: the patient believed the shaman's ways and means were effective, so they were effective. You see, vaccines work, and the shaman's methods also work, so what is actually doing the work? It is your belief doing the work. If you believe the vaccine is effective, the vaccine works; if you believe the shaman drawing a talisman for you, boiling some water for you to drink, and dancing around a bit is effective, then it is effective too. The premise is that you have to believe it is effective.

But now we no longer believe. When that society and civilization encountered modern viewpoints, that belief system began to decline. Why do those shamans no longer work? The methods they use are still the same, the words they speak are still the same set, the things they pass down are still the same, yet in ancient times they were effective, and in regions influenced by modern civilization they no longer are. You cannot say the shaman's methods have become wrong; it is because you no longer believe in him. You have been baptized by science, and you have shifted from believing in the shaman to believing in the vaccine -- that is the same kind of thing.

Insights from the Qigong Era

Let me go off on a tangent here. Back when qigong was just becoming popular in China, qigong masters seemed to command the wind and rain, and they often held what were called "empowerment lectures" -- in huge arenas with tens of thousands of people. In a big stadium, the qigong master would give a talk and lecture to the crowd while channeling energy, and the on-site results were spectacular. Many people cried, laughed, went into frenzies, sat on the ground wailing and pouring out their emotions. Some people said paralyzed individuals stood up on the spot. There were certainly frauds among them, I won't deny that, but there were also some people for whom it genuinely worked. Why? Because in that era, people's level of trust in qigong was the same as ancient people's trust in shamans and witch doctors, and the same as modern people's trust in science. Setting aside the question of qigong itself, let's just talk about this phenomenon.

There was something particularly interesting about these qigong masters. When a leader, or a leader's family member, also fell ill, and if that person believed in the qigong master, then the qigong master's treatment would be especially effective, and then that leader would start supporting him. In that era, the reason qigong became so widespread in mainland China was that many central leaders genuinely experienced great improvement in their health under the qigong masters' treatment. They saw the results, so they supported it. But there was another phenomenon that was especially interesting: these leaders would recommend the masters to other leaders. If the other leaders were not sick themselves, and had no desire to get any treatment from qigong, and were themselves skeptical of or even resistant to qigong, then when the qigong master was brought before them to give a demonstration, it wouldn't work. It worked over there, but not over here. So everyone said the qigong masters were frauds. Actually, we now know the mechanism behind this -- because he didn't believe. That's why they all had to say, "It works if you believe, and it doesn't work if you don't believe." "Sincerity of heart brings results" -- it all means the same thing.

From Demons to Negative Beliefs

Seth says, if you call those demons negative beliefs, that is already a big step forward—not yet to the root, just a big step forward. What does that mean? If you can recognize that the root cause of plagues is not viruses but negative beliefs, then your understanding has already taken a big step forward.

People will continue to die of diseases. Many scientific measures, including vaccination, can themselves cause new diseases. He gives an ironic example: if a person has negative beliefs, and you vaccinate him against smallpox or polio, he will not die of smallpox or polio—the vaccine does work, that cannot be denied. We cannot start acting all mystical just because we have studied Seth and spiritual material. It does work. Whether or not the underlying cause has been removed, let us set that aside for now; taking things at face value, matter for matter, the vaccine does counter the virus.

But the funny thing is, because of the vaccine he did not die of the epidemic, yet he died of cancer. Nowadays there are many vaccines for cancer, including breast cancer vaccines, which are said to greatly reduce the probability of getting the disease. Seth's point is that if society as a whole holds this kind of negative belief—believing that our society will get worse and worse, that the world is declining day by day, that the environment is deteriorating day by day, that resources are dwindling day by day, that our descendants will inevitably live in a terrifying doomsday world—if you do not resolve that, then if it does not die of this, it will die of something else.

Laws That Apply to All Life

Seth says that what he said about viruses also applies to all life. This point is crucial. Viruses have a social life of their own -- do humans have one too? Do kittens and puppies have one? All life faces the same issue: when the overall social nature of a certain species' life is disrupted, those that were originally healthy become lethal.

Viruses are very "smart" -- he put that in quotation marks. In this COVID pandemic, this has been very obvious to everyone. All scientists will tell you that this novel coronavirus is unlike any virus humanity has ever discovered before. It is extremely cunning, constantly mutating, constantly changing. When people say viruses are very smart, they mean that viruses can respond rapidly to stimuli. You try to prevent and control it in one way, to obstruct it, to cut off its transmission routes, and it will mutate into another form to break through your defenses. You finally find its weak point, and it changes again, and it changes extremely fast. They also respond to emotional states -- this is something humans never expected, that viruses actually respond to emotions as well.

Viruses are social; they have social lives. Their lifespans vary considerably. Some seem to remain inactive for centuries and then become active again. Many viruses have lain dormant beneath the Siberian permafrost for over a thousand years, and when conditions are right, they can come back to life. Viruses possess vast memory patterns, which are imprinted biologically.

Seth's original words are that some viruses can multiply ten-thousandfold within seconds. What does that mean? This is what we saw in COVID treatment as the cytokine storm. When COVID becomes severe, people often just collapse while walking. A few months ago there was a viral video of a teacher giving an online class from home. One minute she was still teaching everyone, and the next minute she collapsed and died right in front of all the students in the video conference. Many doctors rescuing COVID patients said that a patient was still eating steamed buns at around eleven o'clock with a good appetite, still discussing with the doctor when he could be discharged, and his condition had improved to that extent -- yet by one o'clock in the afternoon, the person was gone. From eleven to one, and he was already in the hospital, with rescue measures administered very promptly. If you think about it, if a virus can multiply tens of thousands of times within seconds, then no science, no medicine, no method is really of any use. So many frontline medical workers, when they saw those harrowing cases, broke down -- because it exceeded their understanding of medical treatment and medicine. Normal illnesses have a cycle, a process, but this novel coronavirus does not. Some people show no symptoms at all, while for others no rescue effort works. Many medical workers broke down completely. You can see many videos of medical workers sitting on the ground, collapsing emotionally.

Seth says that viruses are in many ways the foundation of biological life. Viruses are the foundation of our life. But only when they show a lethal face do you become aware of them. Just like air -- ordinarily you do not feel its existence, but it is there as a kind of presence. When it shows its ferocious lethality, only then do we realize how powerful viruses really are.

He says that you have always been unaware of the viral army that protects your body. Remember, we and viruses need each other. The host of a virus is a cell, and one could even say the host can be a human being -- it does not matter, because cells are also part of the human being. The virus and its host need each other, and both are part of the same life cycle. From a broader perspective, the virus and its host share a common life cycle. When a person dies, the cells die, and the viruses hidden within the cells, living off the cells' nutrients, also die. They have a common life cycle, just in different parts of it, with overlap in between.

Scientists have found through research that the virulence of AIDS is weakening. In the past, we often saw AIDS patients dying miserably every few years -- one or two years, three years, at most four or five years, and then they were gone. But recently we rarely hear of AIDS patients dying in such harrowing ways. Generally, the condition is brought under control. Apart from medications and other factors, scientists have also discovered that the lethality of the HIV virus itself is decreasing. Very interesting.

Ruburt's Little Tantrum

Before the session began, Ruburt was somewhat unhappy for a while, throwing a bit of a tantrum. He did not want to come to the session at nine-thirty at night to try to solve world problems -- what Seth said about viruses, is that not a world problem? Of course it is. If today's scientists could all hear Seth's theory and could all consider the problem from this angle, then our problems would be very easy to solve. Ruburt said, he really did not want to sit here at nine-thirty at night, when he should be resting, binge-watching shows, watching movies, and instead have to sit here transmitting two or three hours of material through Seth. He said, I just want to watch TV, I just want to forget everything. Do not talk to me about viruses, do not talk to me about the pandemic, I do not want to be a hero either, and I cannot solve the problems of the whole world.

Very interesting. Every person is an ordinary person, all the same. And hidden beneath that temper there was a very good reason. The true belief is that these sessions are a manifestation of your personal and joint curiosity. The source of the Seth material, first of all, is because Jane and Rob wanted to pursue the truth and the reality of the world. These two people, when they were destitute and living on odd jobs, still had the leisure and inclination to fiddle with that Ouija board. Think about it: one in her forties, one in his thirties, renting an apartment, no steady jobs, one making a living selling worthless flowers, the other doing odd jobs for a gallery. They had already sunk to that level, yet instead of properly solving their survival problems, they went and fiddled with that Ouija board, and even "fiddled" Seth out of it, and made that their main occupation. Of course, they wavered and struggled in the middle too. In the early sessions you can see very clearly that the two of them were also very anxious at first: can this make money? How will we support ourselves? Seth spent a long time at the beginning pumping them up, saying, you do not need to worry, your financial situation in the future will be very good. But Seth could not tell them directly, saying, your books will be published in the future, you will be a famous female writer, the books will sell very well. He could only hint and state it openly in various ways, constantly encouraging them.

Their most fundamental original intention was a high and superb curiosity about the nature of reality, a curiosity for exploring the truth. And this curiosity is also the result of a desire on your part to know. As you wish, belief creates reality -- these two people wanted to know the truth of the world, and Seth popped out and told them what the truth of the world is. You want to hold this knowledge in your hands, like a piece of fruit, and give the Seth material as medicine to this sick world. That is the ultimate idea of the two of you. Seth said, you want to make this knowledge usable and practical in the physical world, to help others as much as possible. But that cannot be the only goal.

My Confusion and the Way of Inner Seeking

This passage happens to resolve a confusion of mine. As I have been sharing the Seth material, for almost a year now, it has been played more than six million times worldwide, close to seven million times, and over a hundred thousand people have followed this material through channels like mine. As the number of followers grows, it inevitably brings with it many people's personal problems. They find me through groups, private chats, and private messages in all sorts of ways, asking me many personal questions, and the questions are extremely pointed: there are people with depression, people with bipolar disorder, emotional problems, failed marriages, confusion about their careers, losses in the stock market, and some even come to ask me what their nightmares mean.

Think about it: if even one in a thousand, or one in ten thousand, of these hundred thousand-plus people came to ask you a question every day, what would the result be? Do you think a person with depression can have their problem resolved in just a few words? What is even more frightening is that sometimes it is not even the person themselves who comes to ask, but a relative who comes to ask, while the person themselves does not even show up, and then the relative describes the person's symptoms to you, and they are extremely anxious.

I became very torn over this issue. The first thing that troubled me was that, in this process, they turned me into the person who might hold the key to their problem, and it became a kind of personality cult. A personality cult has its advantages: when they regard you as a highly authoritative figure, the effect of your solving their problem is very good. You point something out in just a few words, and because they think you are a master, they believe every word you say is truth. But this inevitably leads to a very bad result: these people who come with questions are still seeking externally, still hoping someone else can solve their problems for them. They have simply transferred that role onto you: before, they burned incense and prayed to Buddha to solve their problems; before, they believed in certain religious courses; now it has become hoping you can solve their problems for them. In nature, there is no difference at all.

Yet when they have many problems and you want to resolve them quickly, you actually find yourself hoping for this kind of authority and personality cult to exist, because then you can solve their problems quickly and effectively, and they are happy and you are happy. But think about what the consequence is: you have not fundamentally solved their problem at all; you are still letting them seek externally. But if you tell them, "Go look at the material first, go read the books," they will think you are being arrogant: "I came to ask you these specific questions, and you could answer them in just a few words, yet you insist I watch dozens or even hundreds of hours of material?"

I also openly communicated this issue with everyone in the group. Teacher Xiyu, the one who has been sharing through Helen's channel, is himself a professional psychiatrist. He said that what you are now facing falls into four categories of problems. The first category is people seeking psychological comfort from a spiritual counselor: you are playing the role of a spiritual guide. The second category is people who want to improve or clarify their knowledge and understanding. The third category is people who really need to see a psychologist: they are treating you as a psychologist. The last category is even more serious: people who need psychiatric treatment, who have already been diagnosed as ill in modern medicine, yet want to avoid taking medication or receiving treatment, and want you to point out a clear path to a cure without medicine. Each of these four categories requires professional knowledge and a great deal of time, and none of them can be resolved in just a few words.

The correct way to approach this is to first go and watch or read the Seth material, starting from the very beginning with Seth Speaks, The Nature of Personal Reality, The Magical Approach, then The Nature of the Psyche, and now The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, reading in that order. In between, you can do supporting practices, such as the 21-day abundance meditation and so on, including the many exercises Seth provides: the point of power, the feeling tone, these meditations before bed and in the morning. Are these things effective? I can only say they are effective for some people; I cannot say they are effective for everyone. If you do not do these things, and you do not listen, study, or watch, and only pin your hopes on me being able to solve your problem for you, do you think that is possible? Even if I had the intention, even if I devoted all my energy to you, I still could not solve it.

Second, you would once again turn from inner seeking, which is the fundamental way to solve problems, into outer seeking. This is a point Seth has always emphasized, and it is also something I only finally understood clearly today: I appeared to be helping everyone out of compassion, but in fact I was depriving each person of the process of growing on their own. In the future, we will form a community-based organization, a spiritual university, and go into communities and into thousands of households to help them solve real problems. But the method of solving them must be to activate their inner strength and let them solve it themselves. We can teach them methods, means, and tools, but the core of solving the problem is that they solve it themselves. If they cannot solve it themselves, then a professional team and professionals can provide them with professional help, rather than someone like me, a half-baked amateur who is neither a professional in psychology, nor a psychiatrist, nor a spiritual guide. I am just a very ordinary person who is quite interested in the Seth material.

Artistic Healing

Seth says that helping others is one of the uses of the Seth material, but remember it is only "one of." Because the goal must always be an intensely personal exploration of consciousness, and that is also an ineffable creative and artistic pursuit. What does that mean? In other words, if you want to solve a person's problems, you must enter into the depths of his consciousness. You must know what his consciousness is like, why it has formed the beliefs it holds today, and only then can you prescribe the right remedy. And he says that solving every person's problems requires doing it this way. This method cannot be defined; it is a creative and artistic pursuit.

What does "artistic" mean? It means it cannot be repeated. A true artist will never paint two identical paintings. What is called art is precisely that it cannot be repeated — the method for healing this person is necessarily applicable only to this person; change the person and it no longer applies. As for what method to use, you cannot simply take someone else's method and apply it directly. You might say, "I treated Zhang San's depression very well," but if you apply the same method to Li Si, whether it works well is uncertain. So treating individualized case problems must be based on an analysis and exploration of that person's individual consciousness, and then the person who wants to offer help must also possess extremely superb creative and artistic means of resolution in order to help them.

Once I have said all this, you can understand what he means. Only after that does he give examples, saying that the two of you do not make shoes for others to wear, nor do you manufacture deodorizing cosmetics to stop perspiration — he is talking about that kind of antiperspirant roll-on.

Nowadays this kind of thing is very common. He says if you made these two things, you would immediately see material results. If you were a shoemaker, or if you made antiperspirant roll-ons, you could immediately see in the material world that others have shoes to wear, and that others no longer sweat. You can see the material results: you see the shoes you made, the people wearing the shoes you made, and the person who no longer sweats. He says you can immediately see the effect — others put on the shoes, and after applying your roll-on antiperspirant they stop sweating, their armpits stop sweating, and their shirts no longer get soaked through. He adds with a touch of humor that those deodorants and roll-on antiperspirants are not really good things anyway, because they basically all contain aluminum, and aluminum powder is not good for the body. You see, he does not forget to poke fun at everyone along the way.

He says, if you made these two material things, you would immediately see the results — others would be happy wearing the shoes, and others would also be happy not sweating. But what the two of you are dealing with is not this — what you are transmitting is the Seth material, and what you are addressing is spiritual, psychic, and even soul-level matters. This is not a material thing.

He says you are no longer dealing with material details, nor even with the details of psychological abilities. This sentence of Seth's is very crucial: you are neither dealing with material details, nor producing material things; nor are you dealing with psychological details. What psychological details? Psychological means the problems of individual cases — in other words, these are not things for you to do. Conversely, he says, you are creating — truly creating — a belief framework far better than those currently popular. This belief framework is large enough to include all the details. Through this belief framework, people can indeed learn to understand themselves.

He says, although you do not treat specific people's illnesses, and do not produce specific material things, you are creating a new belief framework far better than the belief frameworks people currently hold, and this belief framework is all-encompassing, including almost all details and possibilities. That is to say, it can solve all people's problems. Through such a new belief framework, people can come to know their true selves and reclaim the sense of power that belongs to them — whether their problems are physical, mental, or even spiritual, they can all be resolved. And the two of you are the people who, through me, are constructing such a belief framework.

He says you are providing an overall atmosphere of spiritual and intellectual light. These few sentences are all very important. "Spiritual" refers to those spiritual things we just mentioned, and "intellectual" refers to our wisdom — you are using spirituality and wisdom, keeping these two in balance and working together, to form such an overall atmosphere. What atmosphere? It is the very balanced atmosphere of spiritual learning in our society. He emphasizes the importance of human wisdom on the one hand, and on the other hand emphasizes that people cannot neglect their spiritual side either; these two points must be brought together. He says this is an overall atmosphere like "spiritual and intellectual light" — his wording is better than what ordinary people would use. How beautifully he puts it: you have provided an overall atmosphere of spiritual and intellectual light. This atmosphere can help others — this is very important.

After many people study the Seth material, unbeknownst to them many problems get resolved, including personal problems, physical problems, insomnia, and indeed there are many patients with depression who previously took medication and were quite severe, and after studying for a period of time they got better. But one cannot say that the Seth material can treat depression; you cannot put it that way in reverse. He says the overall scope of this case can indeed help others.

It is precisely because you have not clung to the details — the so-called details being each person's problems — have not clung to individual cases, but instead have focused on the larger level of the reality from which the details emerge. You are concerned with the truth behind all individual cases: where all the details come from, where all the problems come from, the most fundamental cause behind every individual case's problems. You are starting from this level to solve them.

In other words, Seth's meaning is that the Seth material I am transmitting is meant to solve the overall problems of humanity as a whole. It is a framework, a cornerstone, a theoretical structure, a belief system, a belief framework, and even an atmosphere — an open, inclusive, balanced, harmonious atmosphere that brings science and spirituality together. Such a belief framework and theoretical system can help all of humanity. It does not solve each individual problem — or rather, it does not solve each person's problems — but it solves the problems of all people. This is a very good self-positioning of the Seth material.

Through our study and experience, it really is like this. So you see he rarely discusses individual cases — though of course he does not avoid them either, and discusses many individual case problems. He also has seven volumes of private sessions, and those seven volumes of private sessions are truly all-encompassing, full of very private matters — though not all of them are private matters, because some involve specific people's problems, and he was not willing to make those public.

So you will understand how we should use the Seth material, and how to correctly open the Seth material. Why am I saying this now? Because we are currently founding a spiritual university, and are in the process of creating such an organization. In this process of creation, we must put ourselves in the right position: what we are doing, what we are not doing, and what we can do.

Having said this part, he says, "Wait for me a moment," and then delivers material unrelated to the theme of this book, and then at 10:26 says goodbye. The main text of this part has now been fully interpreted.

In the main text of this book, he addressed two themes. The first is the mechanism of viruses. The mechanism of viruses also applies to all life — all living organisms are the same, including us humans and including other species. Their mechanism is the same as that of viruses: it is social, and has its own self-stabilizing structure and balance. When you disrupt or destroy its stability, its social balance and social stability, then problems arise. And if you do not solve the problem of its social balance and stability, but only want to solve its problems, that is called attending to the branches at the expense of the root; you cannot fundamentally solve it. This is a very important issue.

The second issue is what the correct use and correct way of opening the Seth material is, what kind of problem it actually solves, and how it balances individual cases and the overall picture. Remember, it is not that it does not solve individual cases — it hopes to place the resolution of individual cases at the most basic level. This is why we want to establish a spiritual university. I hope that in the future the grassroots organizations of our spiritual university can serve every community. What it addresses is not material illnesses — such as systems requiring injections, dressing changes, ambulances, and nursing care — no, it is spiritual care. We are like a spiritual waystation, or one might say spiritual care, whether restoration or nurturing. Each of our communities can be composed of a dozen or several dozen small groups, not necessarily fixed in number, encompassing people with expertise in various fields, such as those skilled in psychology, psychiatric treatment, scientific theory, and so on. It can solve many of people's problems and serve a certain community population. For those with needs, we provide services, and in this way we promote and popularize it.

And the framework supporting this promotion and popularization can be primarily based on the Seth material, but it must also incorporate other spiritual materials that are balanced, effective, and suited to local culture and characteristics. For example, when promoting in mainland China, it must incorporate elements of Chinese culture; when promoting in Europe, it may need to incorporate European mythology, cultural background, and artistic elements. This is something we must combine differently according to each region. So Seth also said, it is a creative and artistic approach — that is the pattern. I will just roughly explain this issue; that is the general idea.

Later on, this was not just two issues; the later records also mention a third crucial issue — and that third crucial issue is actually even more difficult and has even more depth. If you are tired, you can go rest for a while, take a break, and first digest the first two. Then take out paper and pen, because what follows is the highlight of this session. The key point is still in this appendix, not in the main text.

The first two issues are indeed very important. And this third issue, I said it is even more important than the first two — do you feel like your brain is a bit overwhelmed? If you feel too tired, you can stop for today and continue listening at another time. Because what comes next is indeed very difficult, but it is a very ultimate issue. If you understand what I am about to explain, and if you reach a certain level of insight, you can truly become enlightened immediately; if you cannot reach it, then there is no way around it — you can try listening a few more times.

He says first, Jane said we felt shocked, and were watching closely, because Billy's condition was unexpectedly quite serious. This illness reminded us of the almost universally accepted view: life is terribly fragile. This is their perception; no need to dwell on it.

In Session 836, Seth reminds us, he says animals do not measure by the length of their lifespan, but think in terms of a brilliant present. What does that mean? From here on the material starts getting richer and more difficult. Animals do not judge by the length of life; they think in terms of a brilliant present — you must use this angle to think about what life is. Here he is referring to animals, but actually it is the same for humans: we should not be calculating the length or shortness of life, but should think about what life is from the angle of a brilliant present.

That brilliant present, in some way, compared with your framework, has no beginning and no end. Here he is talking about animals, but actually it is the same for humans, except humans are a bit different from him, because humans have the concept of time, while animals do not. Animals do not have last week, next month, next year, or the idea of being young now and old later, being a child now and becoming elderly later — animals do not have this concept; it is a concept unique to humans. For animals, compared with our human framework, animals have no beginning and no end; they have no concept of time. What you call time does not exist for animals — animals do not have watches; you cannot put a watch on an animal.

And in the deepest terms, from a deeper angle, on a human scale, from the human perspective, the quality of a life also cannot be judged primarily by its length. Applied to humans, it is the same: you still cannot use the length of life; you can only judge by whether your life has been brilliant.

Here, I can add another insight into the relationship between Jane and Seth. The above Seth material is finished; this is the kind of material we continue to seek, and below is an insight. Before Session 836 began, Jane found herself mourning Billy — the word used was that she was sorrowfully mourning Billy's possible death. Then she received material from Seth, the general meaning being that she was thinking Billy might die, because the illness was very serious. Then she obtained the following content from Seth.

Seth said, for a cat, take it slowly.

For a cat, time is in the now — this is very interesting. A cat always lives in the present. In some respects, its life is eternal to it — why? Because it only has the now; time does not exist for it. So you understand now, whether it lived ten months or ten years, it is all the same.

He said later on, she said she wrote it down. Jane emotionally opposed that information very strongly. The above passage was spoken by Seth, but Jane was indeed very strongly opposed to such information emotionally: how can you say that living ten months and living ten years are the same? How can you say that for a cat it always lives in this eternal present? She could not accept it, because her beloved little cat was about to die, her little Billy was about to die, and she could not accept it emotionally.

Below is what Jane said:

Because it seemed like too easy a way to surrender a cat's life, or any other life.

Is this way of putting it not just an easy way of surrendering a cat's life? The word "surrender" itself, he translated with an explanation: it carries the meaning of yielding and handing over; commonly used terms include the surrender of power, the surrender of value, the surrender of interests — this is a technical term. Here he uses the surrender of life — is this way of speaking not like saying the cat surrenders its life to a larger existence?

Rob said, I can indeed accept that Seth's statement is true, and that it is the closest to the truth we can obtain. Rob could accept it, but Jane could not.

Then Jane continued:

A few years ago, this kind of immediate opposition would really have disturbed me. I would sit there arguing with Seth, so much so that the session would not begin immediately. Only after I shut up inwardly would the session begin.

This is something Jane had never said before, because her mental activity with Seth was something no one would know unless she spoke of it. Through this incident she revealed it. I have had similar experiences before: when I disagreed with what Seth said, I would sit there, and on the surface you would see me saying nothing, not speaking, but inwardly I was constantly arguing and talking back to Seth. Because I did not accept what Seth was saying. Only after I shut up inwardly — that is, after I stopped arguing with Seth in my mind — could the session truly begin, and the material could come through. If Jane herself resisted Seth's viewpoint, she would not let the session begin.

So you can understand that this part is invisible to you, but in the earlier sessions there were many very funny incidents. For example, at that time Jane smoked every day, and smoked quite heavily. Seth wanted Jane to stop smoking, but he could not say it — because the moment he tried to tell her to stop smoking, Jane would not let the material come through. Then one time, Seth seized an opportunity when Jane was not paying attention — that is, while he was delivering other material, talking about things unrelated to smoking — he suddenly changed the subject and brought up Jane's smoking, and then he sold Jane out. He said how many times Jane had told me to shut up and not let me talk about her smoking, and so on. You will find this kind of content in the early sessions.

Here he states it even more clearly; this is Jane herself saying:

Only after I shut up inwardly could the session begin.

She says when I was preparing for Session 836, I brought up this issue, and Rob said I had never told him before. I guess I just never thought to tell him. Rob was actually a bit annoyed: why did you not tell me about this? Jane's meaning was, I never felt I should tell him — and did he not say in the previous session, you did not ask me either.

Then below, in Session 837, Seth mainly deals with issues related to Billy's death. He is introducing what was generally covered in the four sessions he had missed. In Session 837 he mainly deals with the issue of Billy's death. We were deeply worried, because what was involved was not just the loss of this cat — although in our reactions Billy's death occupied first place. It was not just the loss of the cat, but rather this death was in fact the most important thing, occupying first place.

We also felt a host of emotional and intellectual by-products arising from that event — because Billy's death would bring a series of emotional or rational by-products. We still could not believe that Billy was gone forever, because we had no remains to prove to us that he had died. Because when their previous cat died, they had held a ceremony and buried it in their backyard, and so on. Since he died at the clinic, this only increased the effect. We did not go to retrieve him, because he had already been frozen, so I could not bury him in the backyard beside Willy, and the veterinarian promised to handle Billy's remains — this is all narration in between; I will go through it quickly.

He says three years ago when Willy died, we did not have the same feeling. And now, Jane said sadly: "If I could answer our questions about that cat's death, perhaps I could also answer our questions about everything."

This sentence is very interesting; underline it. Jane really had a kind of realization: if we could explain clearly why that cat died, we could explain everything in this world. How could such a thought arise? You will see later — indeed it is so. So Jane sometimes inadvertently speaks some great truths.

With the help of the Seth material, she still tried to find the answer — that is, Jane said, if I knew the causes and consequences of the cat's death, we could solve all the problems of the human world. And then, although she still could not solve the problem of the cat's death, she still did not give up, and continued trying to find the answer.

I think that Jane, probably because of her communication with Seth, already had a greater understanding of human life and death. In Sessions 837 through 839, when Seth was talking about Billy, he touched on those issues. But the material was too long — the entire content of Sessions 837, 838, and 839. He says the content of these three sessions was too long to include in this book. And because it was too long, there was no way for us to touch on the key points in any appropriate manner. However, below are some excerpts from the material Seth gave us in those private sessions — that is, Rob had no way to include the full content of these three sessions in the book, but Seth in the private sessions actually provided an overview or summary of the content of these three sessions. Let us look at the excerpts.

Below is an excerpt from Session 837. On the night of Billy's death — Billy died on Wednesday afternoon, and that evening Jane said I want to hold a session, though her mood was already very bad. That night Seth came through and spoke the following passage. This passage is the core — the core of this final part I just mentioned. Let us see what he said:

My dear friends, existence is greater than life or death.

This sentence is very crucial. He says life and death are both merely states of existence. An identity — the character he used for "identity" was not quite right; it should be the other one, but it does not matter — an identity, or an entity, or the existence of a being, whether it is in the state of life or the state of death — your cat's consciousness never depended on its physical image.

Very interesting; let us continue. On the contrary, consciousness itself chose the experience of being a cat, and no one decided that this consciousness had to be a cat. This is extremely, extremely interesting. Let us go through it briefly, go through it for everyone, and if you think about it you will understand.

This passage must be deeply understood. He says existence is the most fundamental thing in this world; existence is the root — this is the same conclusion that Little Flying Insect reached when he entered that meditative state and explored and came back. What is the most fundamental nature of this world? It is existence; existence is the most fundamental thing. And existence is greater than life and greater than death; one could also say greater than everything. He says life and death are both states of existence — being alive is a state of existence, being dead is also a state of existence, and existence includes all of these within it.

He continues: an identity, or an entity, or a being. Why does he not use the word "soul" here? Because if you use "soul," you easily associate it with one particular lifetime. What he is referring to transcends this lifetime; it points to the level of the entity — beneath the entity there are countless reincarnations. The existence of an entity, whether it is in the state of life or the state of death — remember this: an identity, for example, this Billy is a little cat, and this Billy is only the identity of the little cat; its existence does not depend on whether it is alive or dead, and even less on its external appearance. In other words, even less on whether it is a cat or a dog. You think it is a cat, you think it is a cat that looks like this, but what he means is that it does not depend on its physical image — existence itself does not depend on its physical image; existence is the root, while the physical image is merely an external manifestation.

He says as humans, you are more concerned with whether this physical image exists or not. For example, the little cat is alive, the little cat is dead, and you think the little cat is no longer here. He says the life and death of this little cat do not hinder the existence of this identity called Billy the little cat — its existence is larger, more essential, more core; life and death do not matter, and for it both are forms of expression of its existence. I do not know whether you can understand this; we will go through it slowly below. This is not so easy to understand, because it has already touched upon the origin and core issues of this world, and has begun to approach this core issue.

All right, he continues. Just now he stated it directly; now he states it in reverse — he says consciousness itself chose the experience of being a cat, and no one decided that this consciousness had to be a cat. This is very interesting. This sentence looks very simple, but its deeper meaning is extremely profound.

In our minds, in our ordinary understanding, this cat must have an entity above it, or a cat soul, that says, "This time when you reincarnate, you go down there and be a cat," and then it descends to be born as a cat. It is the same for humans — let us first talk about cats; this is our ordinary human understanding. But Seth tells us this view is wrong.

Look carefully through his earlier material — this is how we humans understand it — but look carefully through the Seth material, whether starting from Chapter 9 of Seth Speaks, or in The Nature of Personal Reality, he also discusses many things about reincarnation, but he has never said the thing we just understood: that there is something that sends a consciousness or a soul down to reincarnate. You may feel that he implied this, but he has never actually said it. So here he makes a correction: we must understand that such a thing is not true. There is no something that sends a soul, or sends one down saying you will be a cat, you will be a human, you will be a man, you will be a woman — this is something we humans imagined; there is no such thing at all. You must understand this.

Then why does it become a cat? This is the core of the question. Why can you see a cat? Do you still remember the image of the lightning ball I told you about before? Think carefully about the lightning ball; it is an extremely vivid example. Imagine your soul is a lightning ball; it has energy within it, it is an energy body, and each time one of its lights shoots out and strikes the surface of this glass ball, it creates a point. That point, we say, is one of your reincarnations — one flash and extinction is one reincarnation. From a higher dimension, your short few decades or a hundred years may be just one flash and extinction of it. And your soul, at the same time — remember what I said — simultaneously shoots out these lightning-like tendrils in all directions of this glass ball, each one different; you cannot find two identical bolts of lightning; each one is different. This is one of its states.

And in this process, let me give you another concept: all of this is automatic and spontaneous. There is no one commanding anyone else, no one arranging anyone else. There is no such action, and there is no such process. It is like a ball lightning: once you connect the electricity, it starts automatically. Every consciousness is experimenting, and it spontaneously — remember, it must be spontaneous — every consciousness is spontaneously experimenting with all of its possible existences.

In other words, it is the reverse of a sentence I said earlier: it is this consciousness itself that chooses the experience of being a cat. If you insist on using anthropomorphic language, it itself chooses to be a human or a cat. No one commands it, no one decides that it should be a cat — it already was, and this time its experiment is to be a cat. All right, let us stop here for now and continue on, and this will be easier to understand.

Billy belongs to another kind of possibility. Below is a very good explanation:

In one respect, when you took them from the animal shelter —

This is about Billy's background. If you have been following the Seth material, you know that this kitten was adopted by them. At the animal shelter, it would soon have been put to death, because it was about to be euthanized — no one had adopted it. In American animal shelters, if a stray cat or an unadopted puppy or kitten — it is the same for all animals — if no one adopts it after more than 30 days, I forget exactly how many, I think it is 30 days, then it will be given a routine euthanasia.

But you two went and brought it back. When you brought it back, you switched possibilities for it. That is, according to the original storyline, this Billy should have been euthanized in the shelter. But because the two of you appeared, you changed Billy's space-time, the space-time of this possibility, and thus changed its course. It was supposed to die there, but you brought it back again, and so it escaped the euthanasia at the animal shelter.

Then he says, you actually — although without its consent, of course you could not discuss it with him — you did not even get this cat's consent, and you adopted him and brought him back. The three years he spent with you represent a period of reprieve for him. That is to say, for this Billy, three years was already the maximum period of reprieve. By rights, he should have left three years earlier at the animal shelter, but because the two of you appeared, you changed his possible existence and let him take another storyline. He took another storyline, and so he lived three more years.

Three years for a cat is roughly equivalent to about thirty years, twenty or thirty years, for a human. Because cats can live for over ten years, some live ten years, some live over ten years. So he lived three more years, but he says this had already reached his limit, the limit of the reprieve.

You say, well, this is strange: since no one decides how this consciousness comes, or even how it incarnates, then who set such a time limit for him? Let us continue. Is this getting more and more fun, more and more interesting?

He says:

He himself did not choose this possibility. The possibility of living three more years was not chosen by himself, because he has what you would call other commitments, or rather, other purposes.

He says that living three more years was not something he himself wanted to choose; it was you who made it appear, who made him choose it. But he says he has other purposes, he has other commitments, things he promised others — what things? That he had to die, and after dying he had to go do other things. He says this is something you do not know.

He continues:

Basically speaking, there is no such thing as a cat consciousness, or a bird consciousness.

This sentence is very interesting. He says basically speaking — remember, he says basically speaking — humans have human consciousness, but he says basically speaking, there is no such thing as a cat consciousness or a bird consciousness.

Why would he say this? He says, in that sense, there is only consciousness that chooses to take certain focuses — he uses a reverse way of saying it. What does that mean? It means that from a certain angle, there is no cat consciousness or bird consciousness behind it all, supporting it, letting it reincarnate and become a cat, coming back this time as a cat, and next lifetime coming back as another cat — he says there is no such thing, there is no such existence of what you think of as a cat consciousness behind it, nor a bird consciousness. But we know that kittens, puppies, and small animals do have consciousness. So what is the reason for this?

He says, we can say from another angle that it is consciousness that has chosen a certain focus — this consciousness in this lifetime — not this lifetime — in the present moment chooses the cat as such a focus of cognition, or of perceptual existence. It wants to focus on the cat's focus, and in this way, it is as if the cat has a cat consciousness.

Can you understand the difference here? You may not hear the distinction, but the distinction is very great. That is to say, the source of existence in this world, in itself, cannot be said to be a cat consciousness, or a bird consciousness, or a dog consciousness. In other words, it cannot be said to be a human consciousness either. It is simply a consciousness of existence.

This consciousness of existence can grasp anything — here it starts to get mind-bending — it can grasp anything. If it wants to be a cat, it is a cat; if it wants to be a bird, it is a bird. Is this different from what you understood? In itself, it can grasp anything. Remember, consciousness is an energy, consciousness is an energy with self-awareness — do you still remember this? Consciousness is an energy with awareness, or an energy that can think. Put this way, its essence is an energy, and it can think and be aware. But it does not have the attributes of a cat or the attributes of a dog; it does not have these attributes. It only has the attributes of energy, only the attributes of the existence of this energy. Existence is its only attribute; apart from this attribute, it has no other attributes.

Now that I have said this, do you understand? Are you able to see through it? Then you say, cat consciousness, dog consciousness — that is because at that moment, at that point, at that instant — that is, on that soul ball, that ball lightning — at that point, it happened to want to focus on that cat, and so it shot out a bolt of cat lightning. The focus was on the cat, the focus of consciousness was on the cat, and it combined with the cat's physical body. "Combined" is not quite right; the two of them established a connection. That is, the cat's physical body, and this consciousness that wanted to become a cat — no — that wanted to place its focus on the cat, that wanted to feel the experience of being a cat. The focus of this consciousness wanted to be on the cat, and such a consciousness — the consciousness that in the present moment wanted to place its focus on the cat — and this cat's physical body, the two of them can be said to be a kind of coincidence, or resonance, or quantum entanglement, whichever way you want to say it. The two of them combined together.

Putting it this way, I can only do my best to explain. You will know later why — because Seth himself does not discuss this question. Seth says, I will not tell you this. But since I have gotten to this point, I will use my limited brain as much as I can to expand on his line of thought and explain it to you. I do not know whether what I am saying is right or wrong, and each of you can express your own views. This session is extremely important, and you can state your own views that differ from mine, and we can discuss them together later.

Then, let us pull back and continue. He says:

We have not touched upon certain questions of this kind.

Seth says we have not discussed these questions; we have only occasionally said a word or two in passing. He has never seriously discussed the question of animal consciousness. He only said, in the early sessions, that he had a fragment of consciousness in a dog, while this dog was still alive in your human world. At the time, Jane and Rob asked him, Seth, in this world where we are alive, do you have any actual physical existence, or some manifestation? Seth said yes, he said he had a small fragment of consciousness in a dog. Then a few years later, he said that dog had already died, and he told them about it. But they always wanted to pursue this question, yet Seth was always unwilling to discuss it much. If you look at that material, you will find that Seth always did not want to discuss the question of animal consciousness much.

He says we have not touched upon this kind of question, certain questions of this kind — why? And some questions are the most difficult to explain. He says these questions are actually the most difficult to explain, because — he says I do not want to create distortions — he does not want, because they are difficult to explain, and then through my explanation, to cause you to develop distortions about this matter. So I try as much as possible to avoid discussing this question.

You see, he does not even discuss it, so am I being a bit too eager in insisting on discussing it? He says:

This has nothing to do with Ruburt himself. It is not because of Ruburt's emotional issues, but only relates to this stage of development — at this stage of development, the way in which you can put concepts together.

What he means is, the reason I do not discuss this question is not Ruburt's problem, nor is it Ruburt's problem of understanding; it is the current stage of development of you humans — your concepts, and the way concepts are combined. This causes distortion as soon as I speak — no matter how I say it, you will produce distortion, because your concepts are too strong. The way you organize your concepts, that is to say, your knowledge structure, your consciousness structure, your psychological structure, is not yet sufficient to grasp this thing. And once this thing is given to you, as soon as you understand it with your existing consciousness or existing psychological structure, deviation will occur. So he says, I will not say it.

This is also why many people ask, why does Buddhism not speak about it, why does it not explain more clearly? Many people find Buddhist scriptures more and more convoluted the more they read them; why can they not be explained simply and clearly, so that we can all understand? The Buddha said, I have already spoken very clearly, and everyone says, not clear, not clear, can you be clearer? The Buddha said, this is already the clearest expression possible, and everyone still cannot understand. How is it clear? What you said is the same as saying nothing; I still do not understand.

We will soon insert a short passage from the Diamond Sutra, from Chapter 21, to explain this to everyone. What the Buddha said and what Seth said, in certain areas, they collide with each other, and you will be able to sense the level at which their cognition operates.

Seth says I do not want to say too much. That passage I just gave, the explanation that followed, is my personal — I hereby declare, it is my personal view, it is not what Seth said; Seth did not say it. That is my personal understanding.

Now let us look further down. He says, starting from Session 838 on March 5:

I want to avoid stories of human souls reincarnating as animals.

He says I do not want to discuss this — whether a human soul can become an animal, whether it can reincarnate as an animal in the next lifetime. This is a question many people always ask, right? Because Buddhism tells you, yes it can. If you do bad deeds and do not do good deeds, in this lifetime you are a human, and in the next lifetime you will become an animal, become a beast, and fall into the animal realm. So many people who study Buddhism ask this question.

And this view is not unique to Buddhism. It is also found in Brahmanism, that is, the ancient religion of India; it also has this view. The mechanism of reincarnation was only adopted by Buddhism as one of its views; it was not originated by Buddhism. You must remember, reincarnation was definitely not originated by Buddhism; it began with Hinduism, from the earliest Upanishads, from the Vedas²² within them.

All right, let us not discuss that question — that is, this matter of reincarnation, including the Buddha's teaching of the five realms of reincarnation, the six realms, and so on; originally it was the five realms, and so on, and these are all different. But many people pursue this question, because they are especially afraid of becoming animals; they do not want to become animals, so they keep asking, if I do bad deeds, will I become an animal in the next lifetime? Can a human actually reincarnate as an animal?

The explanation we gave everyone before was very simple: we said no, a human cannot reincarnate as an animal. Because Seth did indeed say this view: he said, because your level is already very high, your state is already very high, so how could you become an animal again? It is like saying you have already graduated from university, and then you go back to kindergarten to attend again. Because animals are too simple, the things animals can do are few, and the richness of animals is not enough. You cannot have already reached the university level and then go back to kindergarten for another two years — that will not happen.

The explanation we gave everyone at the time was indeed this. If you can understand it to this degree, that is fine, no problem. But in these few short sentences that follow, Seth is actually talking about the root of this question, and there is a deeper, much deeper meaning in it; it is not that simple.

He says:

I have been trying to avoid this question — because those are entirely different things.

He says, can a human soul reincarnate as an animal? He says these are two completely different matters — they are not the same thing. Do not rush me to discuss it. Why are they not the same thing? He says this is a distorted version, a very severe distortion, of those entirely different things — other religions say humans can reincarnate as animals, and Seth says this is a distorted version. A distortion of what? It is two or several completely different things, and you insist on putting them together and talking about them as one; that is what he means.

Look at what he says next:

If there is no consciousness cut out to be a cat or a dog, then there is also no prepackaged, predestined particular consciousness meant to be human.

This sentence, this one short sentence, this seemingly simple sentence — to truly digest it is not easy. Let me try to explain it to everyone — Seth does not continue; after saying this sentence, he stops. Because he does not want to discuss this matter; as soon as he discusses it, you will misunderstand, so he does not discuss it.

Then let me briefly explain: there is something very subtle in the middle of this, and I do not know whether I can explain it clearly or well. I will try to understand it with my current understanding — my future understanding may be different, but my current understanding is like this.

First, he says "cut out." Why use "cut out"? Because the consciousness of a cat or a dog is much simpler than the consciousness of a human. This is understandable. Let us first set aside his statement that there is no cat consciousness or dog consciousness; let us not worry about that for now. Let us first say, suppose a human consciousness were to become a cat or a dog —

The Origin of Consciousness and the "Tailoring" Theory

So you might say, comparing cats and humans on the level of consciousness, a cat's consciousness is indeed simpler than a human's. But even so, there is no consciousness that "needs to be tailored down" to incarnate as a cat. Suppose a human could cycle back into an animal, and all it took was removing the unnecessary parts and sending only a small portion of consciousness over -- Seth says even that assumption does not exist.

Then from the other direction, since no such thing comes over, does that mean there is also no so-called "human consciousness" coming back to be a human? Of course. There is no soul as you imagine it, with human personality and human attributes, that insists on coming here to be a human. From the standpoint of consciousness, or from the standpoint of the soul, or of the entity itself, it is simply not human. It is an energy body, a high-dimensional energy body with awareness and consciousness.

So you ask, where did I come from? You are giving a lecture right now -- who is this Mike? All of a sudden you are stunned, because this completely overturns everything you know and your entire belief system. This is why Seth has always avoided discussing this question, and why the Buddha was also unwilling to discuss it -- the question of the first cause, how the universe came to be, how the world came to be. Many religions also avoid it, because discussing this question brings about a very unfortunate consequence: it causes a person's entire belief system to collapse. Our human belief system is built on the foundation of "human," and now if you take the human away entirely, he does not even know what to do, he cannot hold himself together.

So Buddhism from the very beginning said to remove the self and become no-self -- no notion of a person, no notion of a self, no notion of sentient beings, no notion of a lifespan. Many people do not understand: no matter how you come and go, there is always an "I" in there, there is always humanity in there. So the Buddha never spoke of human nature; he spoke of dharma-nature, of emptiness, of suchness, of self-nature. He did not bring up the matter of the human, because he was simply not a human -- the moment you speak of the human, you go off track. But we humans at our current stage of development cannot yet reach that higher level. Suppose the stages of consciousness development are divided into four levels, from zero to three; we humans are right now in the ignorant process of going from zero to one, and the vast majority of people are still at level zero, their consciousness not yet awakened.

So I have expanded on this, and I think many people will truly collapse after hearing it. But I cannot explain this question clearly, because as a human, I truly cannot understand what the consciousness of such an origin is. In the end, even the Buddha could not explain it; he could only say emptiness, unmoving suchness, using these words to describe it. It is clearly something without human nature, yet you insist that I explain it clearly from a perspective humans can understand -- your premise is that it must be explained from a perspective humans can understand, but humans are not even truly existent, so how can it be explained clearly?

This is also the arrogance of us humans: we have always believed that this world and the universe are processed according to our own cognition, and that humans are the center of this world. Every level has this kind of cognition. For example, the cells in your body -- cells have their own consciousness, perception, and cognition. Can cells understand your cognition? No. Do you think the cells in Elon Musk's body can know his grand visions and creative ideas? No. Would you say a cell is a human? Of course not. Then where does your humanity come from? Are you not just five hundred thousand cells gathered together becoming you?

You can only extrapolate from there. A cell is not you, but five hundred thousand cells together become you. You are not the origin of consciousness, you are not that entity -- the two of you are simply not the same kind of thing, just as a cell is not a human. But without cells, the human does not exist either. The human is not the entity, but without the human form, is the entity still there? It both is and is not. It is like when I say without the cells in your body, there is no existence of you as a person; but purely from the concept of the human, does this "identity" of the person still exist? Of course it exists. I can only touch on this question lightly -- it is not something our language can explain in the first place.

The Cat's Death: Communication at the Cellular Level

The book then gives a real-life example. Rob and Jane had a cat at home named Billy, and the cat was about to die. The plants in their house and the trees outside the door also knew about it, because the cat was very likely going to die, and its cells had already sent out the announcement -- the birth and death of every cell is known by all the cells in this world. You say, how come I don't know? Of course you don't know; the cells know. You always think cells are lower than you, but are cells really lower than you? Regarding the material on communication between cells, Rob later added a note: you can look at Session 804, the content after 10:48. The speed of communication between cells is so fast that you cannot follow it or imagine it.

However, the cat could have changed its mind and not died, but the fact that "it was going to die" had already been announced in advance by its cells; the signal had already been sent out. So the cat died within an hour after the doctor left the clinic. Several people who wrote to Rob and Jane picked up on the possibility that the cat would die, wrote to them, and even sent two kittens. Because at that time letters took several days to mail, those letters arrived right after Billy's death, sent by friends or strangers -- other people already knew.

Jane and Rob realized this from those letters with some surprise. In Session 839 on March 7, Seth said:

This characteristic of identity is far more mysterious than you understand.

There's no way to explain it. Because you assign an identity to every living thing in a sweeping, catch-all manner. What does that mean? You give every living thing a name: this is a cat, this is a dog, this is a peony, this is bacteria, this is a virus, I am a person, he is a man, she is a woman, this is a monkey, that is an ape. You insist on using names to assign its identity, but the name itself has no meaning at all. Does existence in this world need names? No, only we humans need names. Existence is existence, life is life, but this plant is different from that plant, and humans insist on giving it a name.

Seth continued:

Now your dead cat, he lives in the following manner.

According to your terms, that cat is already dead, but according to Seth's method, it is still alive. From the following description, we can understand what the existence of true identity is really like.

The units of consciousness that had formed his identity as an organization still formed that pattern, but not physically.

What this means is that the units of consciousness that made up the cat you called Billy still formed a pattern -- a mold of consciousness, but not a physical substance. He also said:

The cat, then, exists as itself.

This sentence has a very Zen-like quality; you must remember it: "The cat exists as itself." It continues:

Within the larger living memory of its own greater selfhood.

See where it lives? It exists within itself, within a living memory that is even larger than its own selfhood. If you understand this passage clearly, you will understand the state of all existence, the state of all life -- whether it is alive or dead, its state of life is the same. In this passage, Seth inadvertently revealed the essence of life, or of existence.

Let me use a human example as an analogy. Your cells die, but the cells actually have not died -- because you as a person are still here, and the identity of that cell exists by virtue of your identity as a person; it must be a cell of your body. Although this cell has died, the larger existence in which it exists is still alive; as long as that larger existence is alive, that cell has not died. Suppose you have a memory that records the birth and death of every cell -- the birth and death of each cell may be death from its own perspective, but from the perspective of your being alive, it still lives within your memory. You came from a single fertilized egg at the very beginning, and all of your life came from there; you remember every cell, and they are all still alive, only they live within your memory.

Then doesn't each of us also live within the memory of our entity? That is why we speak of living as if drunk and dying as if dreaming, of Zhuang Zhou dreaming of the butterfly -- we live within a dream of the entity, within a memory of the entity, except that it is a living memory, a living dream. As the cells themselves, we do not feel that we have died.

Seth also said:

His organization is inviolate, but it is part of a larger psychic organization from which he came.

These units of consciousness formed the cat's identity; this is an organization -- first forming an image of consciousness, and then materializing. After death the body is gone, but that mold of consciousness still remains. This image of consciousness comes from that larger thing -- and that thing is not a cat; it is simply an entity. The same principle applies to us humans. This mold of your consciousness -- the nonphysical image of Billy the cat -- will never be erased; it will not be obliterated or drowned out just because it comes from a higher entity. You are always there.

Billy and His Siblings: The Confluence of Five Consciousnesses

Seth continued:

Whether or not it starts up again is of little consequence.

Whether or not it comes alive again, materializes again -- for example, reincarnates and becomes a little kitten again -- does not matter. It still knows its own identity. It is not that if it reincarnates, it knows it is little Billy; if it does not reincarnate, it does not know. It has nothing to do with that. It always knows who it is.

"But it is not necessarily always so." There can still be changes. What kind of changes? The four kittens born from the same litter as Billy -- behind them there is also a larger organization, and they identify with this relationship among themselves -- they were born from the same litter. Those four kittens also all died. And the consciousnesses of those kittens are now together, forming a gestalt, and those five consciousnesses will come together and form a new identity.

This passage is addressing what was said earlier: normally, this identity never disappears; it always exists. But he says there are variables, and Billy is a variable. The premise must be remembered: from our human perspective, the five kittens all died, and then merged into a new identity; but from the perspective of the larger entity, it never disappears, and can never be violated.

So not long after Billy died, on different days, both Jane and Rob had vivid psychic experiences -- through dreams or some other means -- seeing a more real Billy:

His movements had an astonishing vitality and grace.

The experience was so vivid it almost frightened Jane, real to that degree. Jane really wanted to use these two incidents, along with the animals she had already written about, as material for scientific experiments, to write a book of her own -- her mind was always thinking about writing a book; whenever she had any novel experience, she wanted to write a book about it.

Thus, Thus: The Diamond Sutra and the One-Finger Zen Koan

This last part is genuinely hard for many people to understand, and it may even be subversive. Seth tried every way he could to offer some explanation from his angle, and I have also elaborated on his explanation somewhat. Neither he nor I can really make it clear in very simple language. Let us look at how the Buddha talked about this matter, and then we can appreciate how difficult it is. Here I will quote a passage from Teacher Nan Huai-Chin's talk on What the Diamond Sutra Says²³, about the Zen koan of One-Finger Zen. Why do I place it here? Because this koan can serve as the finishing touch for understanding the sentence I spoke earlier.

In Chapter 21 of the Diamond Sutra²⁴, there is this line:

Subhuti said to the Buddha: World-Honored One, when the Buddha attained anuttara-samyak-sambodhi, was it that nothing was attained? The Buddha said: Thus, thus.

In the previous chapter, the Buddha said "there is no dharma to be spoken" -- you ask me what the Buddha-dharma is, and the Buddha says there is no dharma to be spoken. By this chapter, the Buddha speaks even more severely: not only is there no dharma to be spoken, there is not even any dharma to be attained. Subhuti asked: Sir, back then you had the great awakening and realized anuttara-samyak-sambodhi; in that state of yours, did you not obtain something? The Buddha said: Thus, thus. So what exactly is "thus"? What does "thus" mean? You just said "it is thus, it is thus" -- so what exactly is it? You see, the Buddha also could not say it, so he just said two words: "Thus, thus."

Teacher Nan Huai-Chin says this is a Zen koan. In the Tang dynasty there was a master, the Juzhi monk of Jinhua Mountain²⁵. This Juzhi monk had never gone out to study under others; he practiced alone on Jinhua Mountain. One day he wanted to go out and learn, but at night a voice in the void told him: do not go out; a bodhisattva in the flesh will come in person to teach you the dharma. A bodhisattva in the flesh means a living person who has already reached the state of a bodhisattva. The next day, the Tianlong monk came to see him. He asked Tianlong: what is the Buddha-dharma? The Tianlong monk was a great Zen master, and he casually pointed with one finger. With just that one point, the Juzhi monk had the great awakening. So do you know where the term "One-Finger Zen" comes from? It comes from this. It is not the Shaolin martial art of standing upside down on one finger; that is only the martial-arts One-Finger Zen. The real One-Finger Zen comes from this. Afterward, when people asked him what the Buddha-dharma was, he would point with one finger: whether you understand, it is this; whether you do not understand, it is also this. Many people awakened just because of his one point.

One day he went out, and his disciple, a young novice monk, had been with him for many years. Someone came looking for the master to ask about the Buddha-dharma, and the little monk said: my master's Buddha-dharma, I know it too. The layman knelt down: Little master, tell me, what exactly is the Buddha-dharma? The little novice also pointed with one finger, and that person instantly awakened. The little novice was very happy: so my master's Buddha-dharma is just like this -- one point and the other person awakens.

When the Juzhi monk returned, the little monk reported to him: today a layman came, and I guided him to awakening. The master said "oh," went inside, and said nothing. Then he turned around and came back out, and asked the little monk: can you say it again, how you guided the other person? The little monk pointed with his finger and said: I did it like this -- he asked me what the Buddha-dharma was, and I pointed with my finger like this, and he awakened. As soon as the little monk's finger stretched out, the master cut it off with one stroke of a knife. The little monk was in pain and bleeding, and then he also awakened.

What did he awaken to? He awakened to this: there is fundamentally no thing called the Buddha-dharma, and there is also fundamentally no such finger. In other words, the finger is the Buddha-dharma, and the act of cutting it off is also the Buddha-dharma. The matter of the Buddha-dharma fundamentally needs no pointing. The pointing was because he thought there was such a concrete thing and also such a form of expression. In fact, even that form of expression does not exist -- all of this that exists is the Buddha-dharma. The little monk saw the severed finger and instantly understood: that severed finger, it too is the Buddha-dharma.

Teacher Nan Huai-Chin says that the Diamond Sutra has five or six translation versions, and after repeated study, he still considers Kumarajiva's translation the most sublime. Later Master Xuanzang also retranslated it²⁶; the principle became clearer, but the meaning of the Buddha-dharma became blurred. Master Xuanzang translated scriptures with two-way proofreading: he took the Sanskrit scriptures from the palm-leaf manuscripts and translated them into Chinese, then found another group of people to translate the Chinese back into Sanskrit, and if even one character did not match the original Sanskrit, that passage was retranslated. He really was almost word-for-word, preserving the original flavor, but he overlooked one issue: the Buddhist scriptures are not transmitted through the words, but through the intent behind the words. What Xuanzang never understood was that he thought mastering the words meant mastering what lay behind them. When he was dying, you can look at the Biography of Xuanzang²⁷; he knew when he would die, but he himself said a great honest truth: I have never attained the ultimate in my whole life. Too rigid. You treated this truth the way you would study physics as a science -- how could you ever attain the ultimate?

Kumarajiva's translation is full of Zen language in many places, "like a pearl rolling on a plate" -- like a pearl rolling around in a plate, the pearl turns this way and that, touching no edge, landing on no point. You want to find where the pearl rests in the plate, but you cannot find it. That is why later Zen schools could awaken by using the Diamond Sutra. Zen takes the Diamond Sutra as its core scripture, but it is transmitted more through the mind-dharma, emphasizing not setting up written words, a special transmission outside the teachings, directly pointing at the human mind.

Later in this chapter of the Diamond Sutra there is another passage:

Subhuti, in my attainment of anuttara-samyak-sambodhi, there is not even the slightest dharma to be attained; this is called anuttara-samyak-sambodhi.

The Buddha told Subhuti: when I attained anuttara-samyak-sambodhi beneath the bodhi tree -- unsurpassed, perfect enlightenment, the supreme truth and wisdom -- do you think I obtained some kind of bodhi? Nothing at all to be attained. Nothing whatsoever. This is the source of what the Sixth Patriarch Huineng later awakened to: "Originally there is not a single thing, where could dust alight?"²⁸ If there were even the slightest dharma to be attained -- even a little bit of emptiness, a little bit of light, a little bit of a state -- that would still not be the ultimate. You say you saw five-colored light, a round and shining sphere -- those are all clinging to appearances. Not even the slightest dharma to be attained: this is called anuttara-samyak-sambodhi. Nothing at all -- this is the truth of this world.

Now can you understand what that Zen master's One-Finger Zen meant earlier? Why did I extend this passage after this section? Because earlier Seth spoke about the meaning of existence -- the source of this world is simply an existence. What the Buddha said with "thus, thus" is simply saying existence. It is just an existence; there is nothing to say about it. How do you expect me to say it? It simply exists like this. The Buddha's final meaning is simply: apart from existence itself, there is nothing else. Existence is everything. You cannot define existence. Do you say it is emptiness? You may say it is emptiness. Do you say it is being? It is also being; true emptiness gives rise to wondrous being. Emptiness and being are both encompassed within existence, just as life and death are both within existence. In the passage before this, Seth was actually telling us the truth of this world all along, only he said it rather obscurely.

The truth of this world is just this: the existence of a conscious energy body. It can transform into myriad forms, yet in itself it is nothing at all. The cats and dogs, flowers and grass, people and gods and ghosts that you think of -- all are transformed and derived from that existence. Trace it back to the root -- it is existence.

Returning to the One-Finger Zen koan. What the Tianlong monk wanted to tell the Juzhi monk was: the Buddha-dharma is everywhere; any existence is the realization of the Buddha-dharma. One flower, one tree, one blade of grass, one tree, one grain of sand, one stone -- as long as you can see them and feel these existences, behind them all is that Buddha-dharma, all is the source of this world. So point anywhere, point wherever you like; it is everywhere. It is true that every person is originally complete in themselves, and every flower is also originally complete in itself -- because all are the Buddha-dharma, all are a form of expression of that existence. You are a form of expression of existence; your being born as a human this time is a form of expression of that existence at the focal point of human consciousness.

The Juzhi monk understood, so when others came to ask him, he said: there is no Buddha-dharma, and everywhere is Buddha-dharma; whatever I point at is Buddha-dharma. Pointing at the sky is Buddha-dharma, pointing at the ground is Buddha-dharma, pointing at the excrement in the toilet is also Buddha-dharma -- whatever exists is Buddha-dharma. Those people came to ask because they had already reached that state; one point and they understood.

And the little monk? He thought his master had understood a specific Buddha-dharma, and used the method of pointing to make others awaken -- he thought there was still a thing in this world called the Buddha-dharma. So when the master cut off his finger, he instantly understood: there is fundamentally no Buddha-dharma, or rather, all of this that exists is the Buddha-dharma.

So this chapter of the Diamond Sutra is very simple: the Buddha says there is no dharma to be attained. You want to go practice, you want to realize awakening, you want to seek some kind of wisdom -- what is unsurpassed, perfect enlightenment? Fundamentally there is none. In other words, behind this world there is fundamentally no law; there is only one law, and that is existence. Existence is its only thing. You say it exists, and it exists; you say it does not exist, and it does not exist.

Regarding the interpretation of this section, the time has been long enough. I hope you can take the time to digest it repeatedly and truly appreciate what Seth wanted to convey here. I have ended with this Zen koan to help you understand, hoping it can serve as the finishing touch and give you that flash of insight in your mind.

Session 841

Hello everyone, I am Mike. Today I will share with you the fourth section of Chapter Six of the Seth book The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, which is Session 841 in the original book. This session began on Wednesday, March 14, 1979, at 9:08 p.m.

After that very long and very substantial Session 840 we just went through, this session is relatively relaxed. The previous session had an extremely high density of content, so the Seth material is not evenly distributed. This is especially obvious when reading The Early Sessions: often the difficulty gap between one session and the next is like the difference between heaven and earth. This session is very low in difficulty, very simple, so we can relax and go through it—but it still says a great many very interesting things.

Jonestown and the Epidemic of Belief

Seth says that he stated in Session 835 of the book that the people of Jonestown all died from an epidemic of belief, or something to that effect. He says it again: the reason Jonestown was so shocking was because of its apparent suicidal behavior. The reason it drew everyone's attention was that the mass suicide was startling -- after all, there was the poison, and at the time more than 900 people committed suicide²⁹, so they must have prepared a great deal of poison to drink.

He says that if the same number of people had been found to have died from a dreadful disease, such as the smallpox virus, or from deaths caused by a virus like our present-day COVID-19, then the virus involved would have become the villain, rather than the negative beliefs that were responsible in Jonestown. What I want to discuss is the relationship between thoughts and viruses, and their connection to physical health.

For example, to give a simple illustration: if an airplane crashes, it will certainly make headlines around the world, no matter which country the plane belongs to. But have you ever thought about this -- during the worst period of the pandemic in the United States, the daily death toll was roughly 4,000 to 5,000 people³⁰, which means that every day the equivalent of twenty or thirty airplanes were crashing. Can you imagine what it would be like to have twenty or thirty airplanes crashing every single day? Yet because all these people died of illness, died of COVID-19, we gradually became numb to it. The last time I looked at the figures, 2.5 million people worldwide had died from COVID-19³¹. 2.5 million is an enormous number; if it had occurred in any single region or any single era, it would be an astronomical figure, yet in the face of an epidemic people gradually become numb. Those are 2.5 million lives, each one affecting 2.5 million families.

Seth is saying the same thing.

Thought and Virus

You think of viruses as concrete and physical, while thoughts are mental. We certainly think that way. But you should know that thought also has its concrete side in the body; and a virus, in its body, also has its mental side. Thought has its concrete side, and a virus has its mental side. We think of viruses as concrete and thoughts as mental, but in fact each of them shares the other's attributes.

Seth says, you two have both asked: since you said above that viruses are all good -- viruses are not villains in the first place, and viruses are actually beneficial to our human bodies, they are the most stable cornerstone and foundation sustaining all human life and the life of the biological world, without viruses there would be no life for us, nor for all things -- then why can't a virus just insist on being a good guy? Why can't a virus make use of its own healing ability and cast off those negative influences? He is referring to the negative influences caused by the virus's established beliefs and thoughts. His meaning is, since viruses are good, why can't they always be good guys, why do they still turn into that deadly face and display lethality? Seth says you both asked me this same question.

He says, it is when you regard thought as mental and viruses as concrete that you produce such a question. You think a virus is a physical viral molecule that has mutated and become lethal -- it was originally good and harmless to people, but after the virus's social structure was broken, it was only because some negative thoughts and beliefs affected the stability of the virus's overall social nature that the virus flared up. Your question is: why can't the virus just change a bit, remove the negative thoughts and ideas, and continue to maintain a good aspect?

The reason you ask such a foolish question is that you think a virus is a concrete physical thing that can be influenced by thought -- this is what all of us think. We think we humans are the same way, that we are a physical body with a brain that can be influenced by some negative thoughts. Don't assume Seth is talking about viruses; in fact he is talking about the same thing in humans.

But what you have not realized is this: the virus itself is a kind of thought. You only think of a virus as a physical molecule, treating it merely as physical, and so you overlook this point. In other words, a virus is thought; it is also a mental existence. How can you make it remove the negative thoughts? This negative belief and thought is the virus itself; the two are one. It is not that a physical thing turned bad after being influenced by negative mental factors; the virus itself is both mental and physical at once. It is because you regard viruses as physical and thoughts as mental, splitting the two apart, that you produce such a foolish question.

Thought Is a Concrete Part of the Body

Seth says, thoughts do not merely influence your body -- although they do influence your body, be sure to remember that -- but each one of them represents a triggering stimulus, bringing about hormonal changes, altering the condition of the entire body at any given period.

Thoughts not only influence our body, that is the first point. Following his line of thought, every thought brings a triggering stimulus -- the hundreds and thousands of thoughts and ideas you have every day, each one of them triggers chemical changes in your body. Hormones are your endocrine secretions, a kind of chemical change, altering the condition of the entire body at a given period.

To put it simply, thought is an electromagnetic reality. Suppose from a material standpoint, our body first begins from the electromagnetic reality of thought, and then it further influences and produces chemical changes. Our body has a chemical body, which is influenced by this electromagnetic body, that is, influenced by electromagnetic thought, and then it affects changes in chemical secretions, changes in hormones, and these hormonal changes further adjust the material changes of our body -- cells, tissues, circulation, blood, every system of the entire body, including the DNA level, which is also a material change.

Your physical body is the flesh-and-blood living version born from your thought body. Our physical body comes out of thought, except it is a flesh-and-blood living version, and it also has another version -- the thought version. Actually regarding this part, I remember in The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events it seems Chapter 4 specifically discusses the body of flesh and blood, talking about what our body is composed of.

It mentioned there that your thoughts do not merely trigger chemical reactions within your body. Your thoughts, besides the mental aspect that can be recognized, also have a chemical reality. I must use an analogy -- this is not the best analogy, but I hope it can help you understand this point -- it is as if your thoughts become various kinds of appendages within your body.

Many people may not have heard the distinction clearly. To put it simply, most of us ordinarily think that thoughts influence the body, for example, if I have been relatively anxious or depressed lately, these thoughts really do have an effect on the human body, this cannot be denied, and most people can reach a consensus on it, because it truly can produce changes in hormones within the body. But he says, this is only one aspect of its influence, and it has another aspect: once your thought arises, once it is formed, it does not merely influence you mentally, it is even a real, concrete chemical body. In other words, whatever kind of thoughts you have, you have a corresponding kind of chemical body, and your physical body is governed by this chemical body. So he describes it by saying, you can think of thoughts as some appendages of your body -- invisible things, like the concentration of certain trace elements in your blood.

Now scientists are also beginning to study and verify what role our pineal gland actually plays, which is very interesting. In a meditative state, the pineal gland secretes many things it does not ordinarily secrete, which I have discussed in previous classes, so I will not repeat it here. The things it secretes can make our brain, like a radio frequency, adjust whether we lean more toward the material world or more toward the spiritual world.

You must understand, your thoughts really do produce a chemical body. If saying "produce a chemical nature" is hard to understand, you can say: your thoughts are like a material existence, existing within your body. Remember, they do not influence your body, they are your body -- this is an essential distinction. Just as was asked earlier, why can a virus not behave properly, why must it mutate into something harmful, why can it not remove the thoughts that influence it to become harmful and return to being a good virus -- what you do not understand is that this thought is the virus. Thought is not something that goes to influence the body of the virus; thought itself is the virus.

This passage means the same for people: it is not that our thoughts influence our body, our thoughts are a part of our body, not merely an influence.

Seth says, they do indeed have an invisible existence within your body, just like a virus. You can think of it as a virus, it is a thought virus -- you cannot see it existing, and ordinarily you cannot feel it existing, but it truly does have an effect.

The body is not composed only of what can be revealed through X-rays or autopsies. The body is not only material. Our modern medicine studies the body through these two methods, hoping to discover the mysteries of the body and life through them, but it fundamentally cannot discover them, because many parts simply cannot be seen. It also involves profound relationships that cannot be seen at all in an autopsy -- and also alliances and connections. The connections between cells, the connections between cells and all things, the connections between us and our surrounding environment, these profound relationships are what modern medicine has not discovered. Cells do communicate with each other, and they are also like a society.

Your thoughts are like viruses, concretely related to your body. Whatever kind of thoughts you have, you have a corresponding kind of body -- the same, living, and capable of self-multiplication. Your thoughts will reproduce themselves, develop themselves, without your knowing it. Many people have a belief, for example, they were affected by something, or a previous memory, an event, that had a certain influence on their thinking, and many people choose to cover over that memory, hide it away, put it in a corner. But remember, that thought has not died, you have simply stopped looking at it -- it has always been there, and like a virus it is not dead. Whatever state you put it in, it stays that way, and it will grow on its own, multiply on its own, develop on its own. It is an independent living thing, and using a virus as an analogy has its reasons.

Many things that influence you do so because you think they no longer have an effect on you. Some unpleasant memories, some things from the past, you put them deep in your memory, lock them in a box, but they are still there fermenting, still having an effect. They themselves form an inner alliance -- these thoughts themselves also form an inner connection, linked to one another, and then the vitality of thought automatically triggers all the inner responses of the body. All the inner responses of your body are set in motion by the vitality of thought -- set in motion after they are livingly interconnected with one another, which is actually very complex.

When you are thinking, those thoughts are conscious. You say, let me think about what my thoughts actually are, what negative beliefs have influenced me -- that negative belief you are thinking about is not a dead thing, not a slogan pasted on the wall of your psyche that you can just tear off in one pull. It is a living thing, something with life, just like a virus. Sometimes it will resist, it will struggle. When you try to dig out a deep thought or belief, it will struggle with you, fight against you. It is not like what you imagine, where you can just tear it off in one pull -- is it not easy to change a belief? Is it not easy to change a thought? One thought of heaven, one thought of hell, everyone understands this principle, so why can you not climb out of hell and produce the thought of heaven? Because that hellish thought keeps resisting, keeps holding on tightly, and does not want you to root it out.

The Source of Thoughts

Seth says, you think these thoughts in sentences, paragraphs, or perhaps images—when we think about thoughts, we often say there are certain sentences, certain ideas, or even certain images in our minds, and you feel that these are your thoughts. He says, I will explain this as clearly as I possibly can. Those thoughts arise from inner combinations of which you yourself are unaware.

Those sentences, paragraphs, and images are not your thoughts. How do your thoughts actually come about? This question is very difficult to explain, but I will try to make it as clear as possible—those thoughts all arise from inner combinations that you cannot perceive. Let us just touch on this question for today. To explain this question clearly, it cannot be done in just a sentence or two. How do thoughts come about? For hundreds and thousands of years, scientists and philosophers have been pursuing this question. Now you know that your thoughts come from your inner self, and they are a kind of mutual combination that you cannot perceive; they arise together from these combinations.

After a thought has been thought, for example, when you are examining your beliefs, you pull out a certain thought—a belief is a kind of thought—and when you are thinking about it, it will again split apart into those component parts. When you unravel it thread by thread to analyze which inner beliefs this thought was formed from, as long as you think about it, analyze it, and quietly dissect it, these thoughts will again disperse into the very beliefs that combined to form them, allowing you to see where it came from.

Each of your thoughts should arise from different beliefs mutually influencing one another, mutually interacting, and working together to give rise to such a thought. If you have the inner self's examination and perceptiveness, when you dissect this thought, you can see every mutually combined inner part behind it. Your thoughts have an emotional basis. The smallest cells within your body also build up that emotional reality. You also have an emotional basis, an emotional reality, and it responds instantly to your thoughts.

Is it not more complicated than you thought? Besides thoughts having a chemical nature, an electromagnetic reality, and a psychic nature, they also have emotion within them. Behind every thought there is emotion—sometimes your emotion may not be that strong, and some emotions are not that easy to perceive, but if you dare to think, dare to discover, you will find that behind every thought there is emotion. If you did not have this emotion as the driving force behind it, you would not even have the thought of thinking about it. No matter what you think, there is an emotion behind it driving it.

Why do thoughts have an emotional basis? Because as we have said before, behind emotions are beliefs. If you dig down to the root of an emotion and look at what is driving it behind the emotion, you will discover that there is certainly a belief causing it. So since behind emotions are beliefs, is it not the case that wherever there is a belief, what manifests in front of it must be an emotion or feeling? Are the two not complementary to each other? In other words, there is no emotion behind which there is no belief, and conversely, there is no belief that does not carry emotion. They are mutually fused and combined together; it is not a particularly simple matter. Our bodies are influenced by all of these: influenced by emotions, by thoughts, and by these chemical substances; they all act and influence together.

So our bodies are very magical and wondrous. They go beyond the understanding of our bodies held by traditional medicine and modern medicine—that is, composed of cells, organs, the circulatory system, and the digestive system, like a precision machine. If only it were that simple; it is simply not that simple at all.

Spiritual Immunity

According to what has been said before, thought of course moves much faster than viruses. Thought certainly moves faster than viruses. The action of viruses follows thought. This must be understood -- viruses follow thought. Why? Because a virus is also a kind of thought; it is also a spiritual existence -- it is not merely a material existence. Why does Seth go on and on like this? Because he wants to explain this matter thoroughly, without leaving any loopholes, without causing any misinterpretation; he insists on saying things completely. But saying things completely is truly exhausting. Every context has certain premises and background; if you do not emphasize the premises and background, you are easily misinterpreted by others; yet if you do emphasize them, and explain the premises and background fully, then once you explain it all, it is really tiring.

Every thought is biologically registered on record. Every thought has a record in your biology, in the physical. As was said earlier, you can imagine every thought as one of those invisible parts of the body, existing like an organ, existing like certain cells of the body, like certain invisible viruses -- this is thought. Moreover, every thought has a biological registration on record, meaning it is all recorded, all filed. The influence of every thought on the biological exists there; the effect of every tiny idea you have on the body is reflected in your biology.

Basically speaking, when you are immune to a disease, you in fact have a spiritual immunity. When you are immune to a virus, it is not only that your body has produced antibodies; it is that you first gained immunity on the spiritual level. According to what was said earlier -- a virus is also a kind of thought, viruses follow thought, or thought is another expression of viruses -- thought, spirit should move faster than viruses. So when you have immunity, you first obtain immunity on the spiritual level. When the material viral molecules come to attack again, you already have immunity to this virus on the spiritual level, and the physical or bodily immunity will necessarily arise, so you will not get the disease.

Why is it that with the same novel coronavirus, with the same people, exposed to the same environment, some get it and some do not? This is what it means: some people have this spiritual immunity, so they do not get it.

When you think of a virus as evil, perhaps spreading from one country to another, invading many, many physical structures -- this is how we think now. In fact, thought is contagious. It is not the virus that is contagious; it is thought that is contagious. You have a natural immunity to all thoughts that do not serve your own purposes -- that is, you are not affected by them. A person who believes in science, if you tell him that drawing a talisman or casting a spell will have an effect on someone, it is useless to him. Why? Because you are not influenced by him; you already have immunity to this on the level of thought and spirit. Sticking pins in a doll, drawing talismans and casting spells to curse others -- these have an effect on those who believe, and no effect on those who do not believe. So many people ask me whether there is actually any effect, whether it actually works. Then it depends on whether you believe or not.

So if you want to be immune to all poisons, you need to have a natural spiritual immunity. Many people say that Buddhist scriptures themselves have immunity -- when you encounter terror, silently reciting the Diamond Sutra, the Heart Sutra, or silently reciting "Guanyin Bodhisattva, come save me," and so on, are these not all spiritual treatment, spiritual immunity? But for a person who does not believe, it is useless; if you do not believe in these things, do not trust them, then reciting them is also useless.

Distorted Ancient Concepts

After that Seth paused, struggling to find the right words. He said, you are inoculated with a healthy trust and belief in your own thoughts. You have a natural immunity to all thoughts that do not conform to your thought-beliefs. How does this immunity come about? It comes precisely from a healthy trust in your own thoughts, inoculated through belief.

This is what we often mean by maintaining right mindfulness. Right mindfulness means: you firmly believe that your own thoughts are healthy, you firmly believe that your own belief system, or worldview -- whatever you believe in, you firmly believe that these things themselves are healthy. Your trust in your own thoughts leads to trust in health, because your physical body is also determined by thought. If you believe your thoughts are healthy, your body is also healthy; if your thoughts are not influenced, your body will not be influenced either.

The premise here is that you have to believe in the set of theories he laid out earlier. If you do not believe in this set of theories at all, and still firmly believe in the purely materialistic, physicalist theories of Western medicine, then this set of ideas will not do much for you either -- at most it will give you a half-believing, half-doubting cognition.

Seth said, voodoo once had some old concepts that recognized this kind of idea -- that is, spiritual inoculation, spiritual health, and so on -- but they distorted them through the fear of evil, the invasion of alien spirits, and spiritual invasion and spiritual killing, and so on. I do not know what voodoo is; what he means is probably some primitive religion, probably the English word VOODOO. People who play games know that a long time ago there was a graphics card called the Voodoo graphics card. He is saying that in some ancient religions, they had a recognition of this kind of concept, so they came up with all sorts of strange and mysterious things. What did they make use of? They made use of people's fear of evil. You have to understand how they work -- they make use of humanity's fear of evil, and then they use things like spiritual invasion, alien spirits, evil spirit invasion, evil spirit killing -- they use these things to make you believe, and then they supplement them with some of their beliefs and thoughts, so that you really feel these things are effective -- that this spirit can kill people, that this spirit can invade and occupy your body, that you can be possessed by ghosts, possessed by evil spirits. But if you truly believe it, then it really does become effective.

Therefore, ensuring the health of your spirit and the health of your thoughts is extremely important, because it will bring about the health of the body. You cannot separate spiritual health from physical health -- you cannot say my spirit is healthy but my body is not, or the other way around. The two must be mutually reinforcing. You also cannot separate a person's philosophy from his physical condition, which is something many people have never thought of. What is philosophy? It is worldview. You cannot separate a person's worldview from his physical condition; what kind of worldview he holds has a certain influence on his body. For example, if you hold beliefs such as good and evil being rewarded, cause and effect, reincarnation, and so on, then these things have an influence on you in life, and you will have all kinds of reactions.

Discussion Limited to Framework 1

Seth says, when I am saying all these things about thoughts and viruses, remember the scope of this discussion. Within what scope are we discussing the issue? We are discussing the issue within Framework 1, within this physical world, from the human perspective, on our planet. Everything discussed earlier is being discussed within this Framework 1. Because a person can always obtain new information and new developments from Framework 2 -- do not say that once I have spoken, it seems this thing cannot change. This is only Framework 1; in Framework 2 you can always obtain new information and new developments.

And the body indeed also sends out its own signals to Framework 2. There is a connection between the body and Framework 2. So then you understand: Framework 2 receives the signals sent by the body from Framework 1, and then, based on the decisions and choices made in Framework 2, it returns to Framework 1. Framework 1 is not the one that plays the decisive role.

The Nature of Thought Determines the Direction of Life

Seth then goes on to talk about those who died in Jonestown. He says, those who died in Jonestown believed that they had to die, they wanted to die. How did they use thought to bring about the death of the body? How did they use thought to make the body die? He says, once again, this question only makes sense when you understand that thought is as much a concrete part of the body as a virus is.

He returns again to the earlier question: why can't a virus just behave itself, why does it have to flare up and become a deadly virus? He says the reason you ask this question is because you don't understand that a virus has its spiritual nature, it doesn't only have a material nature. Here he raises the same kind of question: why did those more than 900 people in Jonestown all commit suicide? What kind of thought could make them commit suicide? Why couldn't they change their thoughts so they wouldn't commit suicide? When you ask questions like this, it is actually still because you haven't understood that thought is also a part of his body—or that certain parts of his body are made up of this thought. Thought is just like a virus, it is a concrete part of your body. So when you ask why this body would go and commit suicide, it is because this thought decided it. Thought does not influence the body, thought is your body. When your thought wants to die, the body is already going to die.

But remember, this thought is not the kind we consciously recognize, it is at a deeper level, subconscious or below the subconscious.

A Note: Seth in Seth's Own Eyes

At 10:05, Seth ended the session. But one of the deleted passages led to Note 1. In Note 1 for Session 804, I said that we had recently gained an insight into the relationship between Jane and Seth: we discovered that there is often private communication between Jane and Seth, and you can go back and look at the records from that time. And I mentioned how we had noticed these clues. We were also eager to learn everything we could about Jane or about Seth himself—how we wished we had such abilities, for example, that Jane could communicate with beings from higher dimensions, and that Seth was so learned and knowledgeable, in command of so much, and we wanted to learn these things too. Actually, Rob himself was also envious. He tried as well. He could make contact with Seth, but the information he received was very simple, nothing like the long discourses Jane could produce.

And the following passage everyone must remember—this is a very important statement. This is Seth's self-definition and self-description of the material he himself transmits. We have our own definitions and understanding of the Seth material, but let us hear how Seth regards himself. He said:

I am not some great philosopher. One could compare my thoughts and works with those famous experts mentioned by you readers, but I consider myself more down-to-earth than those other gentlemen—in my own way. I am a lively psychological explorer, and I find myself happily roaming the universe, and in a big, cheerful voice, roaring the news of what I have discovered and am still discovering from one hypothetical shore to the other.

First he is very modest, and then he takes a jab at those other so-called experts. After this book was published, there were probably all kinds of readers writing to ask him, what do you think of this person, what do you think of that person—all famous philosophers and thinkers in human history, such as, Seth, what do you think of your relationship with the Buddha, or with Plato, and so on. Seth first says, I am not some great philosopher; my thoughts and works cannot yet be compared with theirs, I am not their equal. But then he shifts his tone—just now he seemed to be elevating them, being very modest, yet this shift in tone is actually putting them down: I consider myself more down-to-earth than those other gentlemen. See how interesting his choice of words is, "those gentlemen," I am more "down-to-earth" than they are. If you ask what the Seth material is, the Seth material is a relatively down-to-earth kind of philosophical thought. Simply put, that is what it is.

He also says "in my own way." What way is that? It is in an expressive, playful, fun-loving way—Seth loves a lively scene, he loves to have fun, and he is humorous. He says the word "truth" is in quotation marks—putting it in quotation marks means there is no such thing as truth; at our level of consciousness it is impossible to come into contact with actual truth. But relatively speaking, at the highest level we can know—we cannot know any higher—then the highest level we can know, we provisionally assume to be truth.

Truth is a very serious word, but the more the word truth is repeated, the farther away it seems to get, the more unreachable it becomes. The more you say every day, "I am the truth," the more you say this thing of mine is this truth, is that truth, the farther you get from truth. He says I do not put labels on my own theories—I never say that what I say is the truth.

He says: "I explain my profound pronouncements by mixing in some wit, a pinch of humor, and a touch of self-righteous modesty." See what he says himself: with some wit, with some humor, and then with a touch of self-righteous modesty. What is self-righteous modesty? If you savor it carefully, is it not very interesting? Is he modest? He is not modest at all, but he still wants to appear modest, because he knows that being immodest is very bad behavior, and he wants to pretend to be modest, so he says he is "self-righteous." But in essence he actually is modest, because he truly knows that this is still far from the truth. Seth has said countless times: what I understand is not the truth; I can only help you get closer to the truth, or I teach you some methods so that you yourselves can explore the truth. Do not take what I say as truth or as the truth. So he is very clear about this, but the impression he gives people is that he is self-righteous—he carries a touch of self-righteousness, so sometimes the feeling and attitude with which he speaks is exactly like that, and he still puts on an air of modesty.

He says I consider myself a lively psychological explorer—not lifeless, but full of vitality. I find that, at my own request, I happily roam the universe, and I am able, in a big, cheerful voice, to roar the news of what I have discovered and am still discovering from one hypothetical shore to the other.

This passage has the flavor of Zhuangzi's "Free and Easy Wandering." But what is different from Zhuangzi? After he finishes roaming, he still wants to speak, still wants to show off—he wants to tell those of us on this side of the river what he knows and what he is still learning. He has already reached the other side of the river. He uses a vivid metaphor—remember, what is said here is the "hypothetical" shore. Does this shore exist? No, whether it is this riverbank or the two shores, they are all hypothetical. And then I tell what I know in a very cheerful, loud, big and cheerful voice—remember, it must be cheerful; "big" refers to a loud voice, and also to a long duration and a great amount of content—roaring from the unknown far shore to this shore where we now live.

This is his description of himself. This also makes it convenient for everyone to truly understand what Seth wants to do, and what position the Seth material occupies within the entire framework of human knowledge and the structure of wisdom.

All right, that is all for today's interpretation of this part. Thank you all for listening, and I wish everyone a magical and beautiful day.

Part Five of Chapter Six of The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, that is, Session 844 (Session 844). This session began at 4:01 p.m. on Sunday, April 1, 1979. It was an afternoon session. Why was it in the afternoon? You will understand once you read it. Since the previous session, that is, since Session 841 (Session 841), Jane had been busy with matters concerning other books. Amid her busy schedule she gave four sessions: two private sessions, and the other two were Sessions 842 and 843, so those two sessions are unrelated to this book.

Early in the morning of the previous Wednesday, a serious incident began unfolding at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant.³² There have been very few severe nuclear power plant accidents in human history: one was the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant leak, one was Chernobyl, and another was the nuclear leak at the Fukushima nuclear power plant³³—all extremely serious accidents. What follows is about a mass event.

The Three Mile Island Nuclear Incident

This nuclear power plant is located below Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, on a small island in the middle of a river called the Conauga or something like that. It looked like a mechanical failure or human error caused one of the two reactors in Unit 2 to overheat. The Fukushima nuclear plant and the Chernobyl nuclear plant back then were the same way -- when a nuclear plant has a serious malfunction, it is generally because the reactor overheats and cannot be cooled down. Then it leaked radioactive water into the river, and at the same time released a small amount of radioactive gas into the atmosphere. The whole plant is now shut down, because Unit 1 had already been shut down earlier for refueling, and Unit 2 had a problem while it was running, so both units are now off.

From Wednesday to Sunday, the situation actually got worse. The damaged reactor core -- the nuclear fuel rods -- underwent a catastrophic meltdown, which in the nuclear plant industry is called a core meltdown. When the reactor cannot be cooled down, the reactor, because of the heat it continuously generates on its own, reaches temperatures of several thousand degrees, and after melting the entire reactor, it will burn through the protective concrete, steel, and lead. And it keeps heating up, and will keep burning through, and in this process it is also very likely that the overheating will cause the air to expand, including the heavy water used for cooling inside evaporating into gas, blowing the entire reactor apart. Once it blows apart, a large amount of gas containing highly concentrated radioactive material disperses into the air, and human beings affected by a certain concentration of radioactive gas will basically all suffer fatal consequences. The Fukushima nuclear plant back then was the closest to us, and its core also showed signs of melting.

Besides an explosion, the worst possible accident could also happen. Nuclear energy advocates had always said this was almost absolutely impossible -- because in the process of designing the nuclear plant, they had designed many layers of defensive measures against the most terrifying possibilities. Yet even with so many defensive measures, an accident still happened. Rob meant: "Didn't you say there would never be an accident? That an accident would absolutely never happen, so how could an accident happen?" If a core meltdown occurred, it would spew huge clouds of radiation into the atmosphere, and hundreds of thousands of people could die in various ways. Death from radiation is not immediate; some die very quickly, and some develop cancer or severe immune system diseases, leading to death one after another over the course of several years. There were already people saying that the millions of residents living near Three Mile Island should be evacuated. Some refugees also came to the Elmira area where they lived, which was the small city they lived in. When looking at a map, Rob discovered that this small town north of Harrisburg was only about 130 miles away from them in a straight line -- 130 miles is less than 200 kilometers. He said thoughtfully to Jane, "Strange, with so many nuclear power plants in this world, we happen to live so close to the one that malfunctioned."

The Elmira, New York, where they now lived, is above Pennsylvania. Although this area was assumed to be outside the danger zone, there were many conflicting reports about whether the prevailing wind direction would cause them to be affected by the aftereffects of a core meltdown. Even now, local civil defense officials measured the radiation level in the air every day with radiation meters, just like the later Fukushima nuclear plant, using millisieverts as the unit.

Rob said to Jane, "Jonestown is far away on another small island in South America, while the Three Mile Island tragedy hovered at the edge of the personal world of the two of them. The whole thing had a sense of unreal urgency." In South America, several thousand kilometers away from them, more than 900 Americans had committed mass suicide³⁴; the other was an event from November of last year, and then by March, a nuclear plant leak happened only a little over a hundred miles away from them, which could also cause large numbers of people to die. He found it very strange: one was very far away, and one was right in front of them -- but they could not see anything. Jane could not see what happened in Jonestown, nor could she see what exactly happened at Three Mile Island. Yet both of these events gave them a sense of urgency. The first urgency was: do negative beliefs and influences really pose a fatal danger to ordinary people? The second was: the development of science, the development of technology -- is this kind of nuclear power generation ultimately good or bad for humanity? Is it one time bomb after another?

Rob said, "Within only six months, the Jonestown and Three Mile Island events happened, and these two events happened one after another, almost as if it were not a coincidence." They represented the two poles of humanity's current main beliefs: one religious, one scientific. Today's society is mainly two poles -- belief based on religion and belief based on science. So this book of his also places emphasis on: what is different, and what is the same, between fanaticism based on religion and fanaticism based on science.

Jane and Seth's Joint Trance Session

We certainly hoped that Seth, as he continued the dictation, would have a great deal to say about the Three Mile Island incident, just as he had about Jonestown. In fact, the material on Three Mile Island had already begun in this afternoon's session. That is also why it was decided to excerpt this content in the book.

Actually, this session might perhaps be called a joint Jane-and-Seth session -- a Jane-Seth session. Because it was different from other sessions: in other sessions, Seth spoke through Jane -- Seth merely used Jane's mouth, but the one speaking was Seth. This session was not like that. Jane was speaking, but beneath Jane's consciousness there was Seth's consciousness within it. Jane's own consciousness was on the topmost layer, as if Jane herself were speaking, while Seth's consciousness was on a lower layer of Jane, exerting a stabilizing influence on Jane's upper consciousness. This situation was quite unusual; it rarely happened.

Because after lunch today, Jane had written some excellent analysis of two of Rob's recent dreams. As they sat at the dining table discussing this analysis, Jane felt she could enter a trance state of her own, rather than merely a Seth trance state. There is a difference here. All the content that will be described later was spoken by Jane after she entered a state similar to self-hypnosis; whereas ordinarily she also entered a hypnotic state, but as soon as she entered it, Seth was inside. This Seth was beneath her consciousness, so it was not quite the same as an ordinary Seth session.

She began speaking in her normal voice -- not Seth's voice. You see, when Jane transmits the Seth material, her voice tends toward a masculine voice, with a very strong European-English-like accent, leaning male. This time, Jane instead spoke in her own voice, delivering the material at a deliberate pace. When Rob realized she was about to begin a session, he said, "Wait until I find a pen and notebook, and then I'll start taking notes." Jane then continued to transmit very thought-provoking material about dreams. It is excerpted here for two reasons: first, some of the personal portions are placed in Note 1.

What follows is all spoken by Jane -- but when Jane said these things, she was riding on top of Seth's consciousness.

These are still quite scattered.

Meaning the information was still rather scattered. But she had two points to make. First, because objects originate only from human imagination, there is always a very strong connection between objects and human dreams. According to the content of the previous sessions, the role of the imagination was discussed in Chapter 5: since all objects in the three-dimensional world originate from human imagination, there will always be a very strong connection between objects and human dreams.

Objects serve as material symbols of inner reality. Therefore, whether or not he is aware of it, the natural person will look at objects in such a way -- in the manner of seeing objects as external material symbols of inner reality -- that the objects represent the very symbols that originally sprang from his own dreams.

That is to say, these events in our lives, these experiences, and even some objects, all come from our dreams. This also has to do with large events. Small matters are the same, and large matters are the same as well. For the sake of convenience, you may for the time being call it a psychological kind of object -- just like an ordinary object, this event is seen and recognized by a large group of people.

Session 844

The drama of Christ is exactly such an example. Private and mass dreams were then projected outward, first as a dream, with such a need, and entered into the realm of historical time.

In this example, private and mass dreams were subsequently projected outward and became a historical event. People then reacted to it in such a way -- reacting to it as a historical event -- and thus all sorts of people became external participants. And the triggering, the occurrence of this event, was because people had such a dream drama within them, which was then projected outward, but within a much larger mass dream. That dream was then interpreted in the most real, concrete way. Even so, it still allowed people to receive that message.

But that inner drama itself -- the stage play within these people's inner dreams, within their inner world -- was not remembered by everyone. When the dream and the historical became mixed together and was interpreted by so many people, its message became distorted. When the dream and the historical events that occur in our three-dimensional world became mixed together, first it originated from everyone's inner psychological drama, a drama in dreams, which was then projected outward to become a historical event; when these two things became interwoven, the information became distorted. Or rather, it became mixed together with other such dreams, and the messages of these dreams were also extremely different. It was not one person having such a dream; it was many people of that era -- many people had similar dreams: that someone would come to redeem them, to rescue them, and this person might be the child of God or something like that.

Look at the troubles at the Harrisburg nuclear power plant. The entire concept of nuclear power was first realized in a dream -- nuclear power generation first arose from scientists' dreams in the dream state. Each person's individualized imaginative activity then became the dreams of many people through fiction and art. Our vast potential and danger regarding the immediate possibilities of nuclear power then began to spread in all directions from that dream. Because when it became the dream of many people, many people were participating in this original dream -- the dream of the nuclear power plant that initially existed in the minds of certain scientists -- and through novels, films, television dramas, or some kind of description, it became the dream of the general public. Everyone had their own perception of the nuclear power plant. Each person's perception of the nuclear power plant was different, because some people lacked the necessary scientific background knowledge. Even today, very few people can truly explain clearly the basic principles of nuclear power generation.

In this situation, after the mass media spread the concept of the nuclear power plant, each person's interpretation of this matter became different. Optimistic people felt that nuclear power plants solved humanity's energy problem -- ordinary energy sources would inevitably be exhausted, whether oil, natural gas, coal, or wood, they certainly would not be enough for the needs of human development; but nuclear power seemed to open a new window for us, as if it could provide inexhaustible energy. But for pessimistic people, this nuclear power plant was a danger. So the same original dream, after it later became a public event, a public dream, because everyone's perception of it was different, became such a mixture of both potential and danger.

This example is exactly the same as the earlier example of Christ being crucified. The original dream was like that at first, and later it was projected outward to become a historical event that everyone saw; after seeing it, everyone continued to elaborate on it in their minds -- through hearing about it, seeing it with their own eyes, word of mouth -- and this event again became everyone's collective perception, a collective dream, but each person's perception was strange and varied, all different from one another. These dreams mixed together and formed our later understanding of this event.

The Two Poles of the Nuclear Energy Dream

This is very interesting.

It is by no means coincidental that this particular situation was first depicted in a movie and thereby reached the social atmosphere.

Before the nuclear power plant leak, there was already a movie specifically about what consequences an accident at a nuclear power plant would have³⁵. The appearance of this movie and the event itself were not coincidental. Many films and television shows have strong predictive abilities; for example, the most famous American animated show The Simpsons has made many astonishing predictions.

In your terms, nuclear power represents power, and it stood in people's dreams in the guise of God.

Why did it stand in dreams in the guise of God? Because it represents the power of the universe, providing energy in ways we cannot see. Normally we can see how much oil and natural gas we use, how much coal we burn, and then how much electricity is generated; but with nuclear power generation, it seems you cannot see it. It only needs a very small amount of nuclear raw material to produce endless electricity. What we are using now is still only the method of nuclear fission power generation; humanity has still not fully mastered the method of controlled nuclear fusion power generation. When humanity masters controlled nuclear fusion power generation -- rather than nuclear fission -- the energy released will be even more terrifying and unimaginable. Scientists once predicted that if humanity mastered controlled nuclear fusion power generation, the energy released by a nuclear fuel pellet the size of a match head would be enough for the entire human population of the earth to use for a full year³⁶.

In your terms, man has always considered himself separate from nature, and therefore he necessarily feels separate from the forces of nature. And in his dreams, there must necessarily be a very great dividing line between the two. In fact, nuclear energy came forth in the guise of a dream symbol, and was paid out in the world as something we had to deal with.

Because people have this kind of cognition -- separating themselves from nature, separating themselves from the forces of nature -- they also separate themselves from nature in their dreams. He necessarily feels separate from the forces of nature. But in fact, nuclear energy came into our real lives in the guise of a dream symbol, and became something we had to deal with.

Christian fundamentalists -- you see, he keeps picking on the Christian fundamentalists. They believe that nuclear energy is a power God might use to destroy the world. According to Christian doctrine, the world is certainly going to be destroyed in the end; there will certainly be a day of world destruction, and then a great judgment. So how exactly will the world be destroyed? These sects believe that nuclear power plants are the tools God will use to destroy humanity. The Harrisburg incident had a special significance for them.

What about those scientists? Some scientists equate nuclear power with man's great curiosity, feeling that they have snatched this great energy from nature. Many scientists are like little children: I discovered nuclear power generation, and with this technology, humanity's energy will be inexhaustible from now on. This energy had not been discovered by humanity before, and now scientists have discovered it. This is the greatest gift to humanity -- from now on humanity will never have to worry about energy again. He feels as if he has stolen some secret manual or treasure from nature, one that can provide a continuous stream of energy. He feels that he is smarter than nature, and also smarter than his fellow human beings -- because ordinary people had not figured it out. Therefore he views these matters in his own way.

Possibilities still appeared in wave after wave, and in private and mass dreams, people would try out various endings for that particular story.

Because this event had not yet fully developed -- this was Sunday, and the leak had only happened on Wednesday -- all kinds of possibilities were still rippling outward layer by layer. People were rehearsing, in their dreams and in group dreams, the various possible endings for that story: would hundreds of thousands of people die? Or would it be brought under control quickly? This also includes our current pandemic -- right now, everyone has their own different understandings and interpretations about when the pandemic will end, in what way it will end, and when the world will return to how it was before the pandemic. How the pandemic develops also has its possibilities; at the level of Framework 2, there are many possibilities. Broadly speaking, this event involved over a million people, and they were all affected to a greater or lesser degree -- whether through moving, evacuation, or dispersal.

Jane's Self-Induced Trance State

At 4:45, Jane said during a short, unannounced break: "I learned something this afternoon." She said herself: "I've thought about this before too, but only figured it out at the end -- when I don't have any concerns, these sessions seem to go much better; when I feel I have concerns, I find it hard to get into the state. In a way, just as it was about to end, I started to become alert, to have concerns. Otherwise, I think I would have gotten more about nuclear energy." But she did not think this layer of concern was related to a fear of making predictions that would later prove wrong -- it was not because of that. She also did not know what it was because of.

Then Jane said: "I remember Seth just now even helped me bring in this Christ drama thing." Then Jane said: "Oh, here he comes again." She almost immediately returned to her trance state -- using "her" trance state, not Seth's trance state. There is a connection here.

The occurrence of the Christ drama was so that humanity would at least achieve the love of fellow humans (humanhood, not brotherhood) -- a quiet, safe consciousness, and a moral atmosphere in the physical world that would support people.

The Christ drama occurred wanting to achieve this effect: based on the deep love among fellow humans, that love being a quiet, safe consciousness, and a moral atmosphere in the physical world that would support people. These things can sometimes still linger -- you see some very large, very grand churches, and when you go inside there is a quiet, safe, very sublime, awe-inspiring, sacred moral atmosphere. That is the result of that dream. The Christ drama was originally a psychological drama, but it did build a historical reality and became a historical event.

But did humanity achieve this love based on fellow humans? No. We also have not achieved a safe state of consciousness, or a workable moral system. So people have fear about not having achieved these -- the love of fellow humans, a safe consciousness, a workable moral system. This fear leads to his dream of destruction: feeling that if these are not achieved, will humanity not head toward collapse and extinction?

No matter how those dreams are expressed, and indeed the current physical event existing at the power plant near Harrisburg may very likely be compared to -- and also put in quotes -- a warning dream, telling people to change their behavior.

The "people" here refers to every individual, and also to humanity as a whole. Because the Christian psychological drama wanted to achieve that effect, but people feel it was not achieved, so they fantasize: if we humans continue to be morally corrupt, continue to pursue material things, continue to lack this peaceful and serene psychological consciousness, this overall human consciousness, then humanity will inevitably head toward destruction. This is a viewpoint held by mainstream Western society up to now. Because of such beliefs, such ideas, the nuclear power plant leak is like a portent of something, or provides evidence, a warning, for this direction of development.

At 4:47, Jane said: "Good, I knew there was some connection between the Christ drama matter and what is happening in the world today." That connection is exactly the connection just described.

Note 1: How Unremembered Dreams Work

Below is Note 1. When Jane, in a trance state, gave this material on how each person individually makes use of dreams, it was largely in answer to a question we had recently been speculating about: if most people do not remember their dreams most of the time, then what effect can their dreams have on them? This is a question many people have been asking.

Interestingly, I had a dream last night, and by morning I had forgotten it. When I first woke up I still wanted to write it down, but then I forgot. Later in the morning I suddenly remembered -- I forgot what the circumstances were, but anyway I remembered that I had been dreaming all night, a very long, long dream: I dreamed that I had been representing Trump's side the whole time, negotiating with Biden's side, and we reached a compromise agreement. The specific content of the agreement was very detailed and complex, a kind of compromise plan, but the specific content I forgot, I could not recall it. At the time the scene was very vivid: in a conference room, going in and out, people coming and going, different people attending the meeting. I was one of the parties at the meeting, and also seemed to be the main proposer, on one hand persuading Trump's side to accept some compromises -- you cannot expect the other side to agree to all your demands -- and on the other hand persuading Biden's side to make some concessions and retreats. Interesting, right? I am just sharing this for everyone's amusement; just take it as a joke. Most of the details of dreams like this, we forget.

This question is actually built on the foundation of "we believe that everything is beneficial and useful." We tend to think that everything has a cause, everything has a reason, everything has a law, everything has a pattern. In Session 840 -- that very long, three-hour session (Session 840) -- the core point made at the end was: there is no cause, there is no reason. Cause and reason are things we humans arrange and use to understand. The true source of the world is simply existence. Because what is this world made of? This world is made of consciousness, made of units of consciousness. What is consciousness? It is this energy that knows it exists and has self-awareness. The basic attribute of this energy is only one: the awareness of its own existence. Existence is its source, its fundamental attribute; apart from this attribute there are no other attributes, or one could say that all other attributes are later derived, developed, and changed from it.

Here it raises this question again: you always want to ask why this is and why that is, always want to ask what kind of connection and influence there is between dreams and reality. But you have always been considering it on the basis of what is useful and valuable to reality, to our lives -- what use is a dream like this to our lives? You always think about the problem this way, so dreams must necessarily play an important role in life. In ordinary terms, how is that accomplished?

The excerpt below is the answer Jane gave in today's trance state.

Even if you cannot consciously remember your dream, you still receive the information. A portion of it will appear in some way in your daily experience, in your conversations or in your daily life.

Whether or not you can remember the dream, it will appear in your life.

Because dreams are a perfect combination of stimuli from the inner environment and the outer environment, other events are often used to trigger the messages within the inner dream, and the reverse also often happens.

Our dreams and events are a process of mutual triggering. Do not think that everything in the three-dimensional world is derived from dreams -- indeed there is such a principle, but it serves as the rehearsal ground for events, as a stage play, rehearsing all possibilities and selecting one event that needs to be experienced in the three-dimensional world to be concretized there. But in this process, the three-dimensional world also in turn influences it.

For example, I have mentioned this example before, and it is very meaningful here. Before humans mastered fire -- before they could make fire by drilling wood or control a fire source -- fire always meant disaster for ancient humans, because once a fire started it could not be controlled, and we could not use fire, so it could only be a disaster. But later, when humans acquired the technique of making fire by drilling wood, or the ability to use a fire source, to make fire, to preserve a flame, then when people dreamed of fire, fire represented warmth, safety, and home. Campfires also had a healing effect on people, and even today, the healing effect of sitting together around a campfire is very obvious. This originates from ancient times: back then, hunters went out hunting and ran around all day, sometimes for several days, working very hard, and when they returned to the tribe, to the camp, there was a fire there that never went out all year -- during the day it was kept as a small flame, and at night it would blaze up. At night, the campfire was in the center of the camp, and many people sat around it chatting, telling stories, telling myths, or talking about the day's experiences, discussing the next day's hunting plans. The campfire crackled and popped, and people received healing in this state. Just as I said a while ago that the sound of rain has a healing effect on people, the sound of a campfire -- this natural sound of fire, the act of warming oneself by the fire itself -- also has a healing effect. So you will understand why many ancient Chinese homes, and even American homes today, still keep fireplaces. Fireplaces are actually no longer needed -- now everything is central air conditioning, constant temperature and humidity -- so what do they need a fireplace for? Apart from aesthetics, it seems to serve no other purpose. But actually that is not true; the act of warming oneself by the fire, a family sitting around a fireplace warming themselves, has a very strong healing effect. In China, homes used to always have a fire pit, a hearth fire, and even now among many ethnic minorities the fire pit is still an important part of the home. So fire, before and after humans mastered it, has different meanings and symbols in dreams. This shows that our beliefs and perceptions can influence the information that something gives us in a dream. Not only do dreams influence our lives, we also influence dreams; the two are a mutual process, not a single one-way street.

For example, when three people gather together to watch the same television program, each of you will also have different interpretations of different parts of that program. Those parts are also related to each person's dreams from the previous night, used to bring them the dream information in a way she can accept.

When we watch the same television drama, different people, because of their own roles and perceptions, will see different things. For example, in an urban drama, men and women, married and unmarried people, will have very different perceptions, understandings, and interpretations of many plot points. She may not even know why she is watching this drama today, but the plot points she sees that touch her and resonate with her may come from her dream experience the previous day, from the information the dream was supposed to give her. Because the memory of the dream is gone, the dream information is transmitted to her again in this way. Each person receives different content, and each person may also have had different dreams. This really requires a great deal of discernment -- many people say, "Which things are dream information? I do not know" -- indeed, it is not that easy to distinguish.

For example, you notice a news item in the newspaper while others are ignored by you -- this is because some part of that news item represents certain dream messages.

When you see some news, much of it does not appear in your line of sight by accident; its appearance has a certain meaning.

Other parts come from another neighbor; a certain neighbor says a sentence to you, but it is also through this dreamer's interpretation of the neighbor's words that a dream message is further brought out.

A neighbor says something to you, intentionally or unintentionally, which has no important meaning to the neighbor, but to you -- the speaker may not intend it, but the listener takes it to heart -- you receive a lot of inspiration and are moved. Actually, this inspiration and being moved may be exactly what the dream wanted to tell you, the information it wanted to bring you, spoken through the neighbor's mouth. In such cases, the person rarely realizes that a dream was involved.

Perhaps you will dream of driving, taking a long trip, only to discover that when you drive too fast, a tire blows out. Perhaps you never remember that dream, but in any case, you will encounter that kind of situation.

Perhaps you never remember that dream, but in any case, you will encounter that kind of situation -- in what way will you encounter it? One possibility is through television: you watch a drama on TV, and in the show a car's tire blows out; or you see a report in the newspaper about someone whose tire blew out while driving and had a traffic accident; or you hear a story about a similar predicament -- a friend says, "I have a friend whose tire blew out while driving the other day." You will encounter it in various ways. Of course, there are so many physical stimuli around you, so much information given to you every day, that on any given day similar situations may appear and attract your specific attention.

There is so much information every day; which things are what dreams want to convey to us, we do not know, because there is too much. Even so -- even if you cannot distinguish it, and perhaps you did not remember the dream, and do not know its connection to the dream -- the situation itself that attracted your attention may cause you to check your tires. You do not feel it has anything to do with the dream, nor do you feel that the television, the news, or a friend mentioning a tire blowout has anything to do with your dream of a tire blowing out on a long trip, but after receiving this information, when you travel you may consciously or unconsciously check your tires. Many people do this. Or, you decide to postpone the trip and first have maintenance and a systematic inspection done. Or conversely, it leads you to an inner speculation: think about whether you are moving too fast in some direction? Because a tire blowout is also caused by driving too fast, forcing you to stop and be delayed -- is there such a hint in this?

But you will always get the information of that dream.

No matter what, you will receive what the dream wants to convey to you. Whether you remember it or not, the influence of dreams on your life is everywhere, but it is very hard for us to distinguish it. But you do not need to distinguish it either; as long as its purpose is achieved, that is enough -- it is enough that the dream achieves the effect it should achieve; there is no need to specifically distinguish which things are from the dream and which are meaningless, otherwise life would be too exhausting.

Session 845

This session began at 9:25 p.m. on Monday, April 2, 1979³⁷. Rob himself noted that although Seth did not say this session was dictated material related to the book, for two reasons Jane and he decided to include this portion in the book. One was that the material in the first note could be regarded as an extension of Seth's discussion of reason and intuition in Session 825; the second was that they wanted to give everyone Seth's comments on Jonestown and Three Mile Island, even though they did not appear in a formal session.

One week after the Three Mile Island incident³⁸, that is, the nuclear leak incident, the situation at the crippled nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island was still extremely tense. Small amounts of radiation continued to leak into the atmosphere, federal Atomic Commission advisers described the predicament as stable, and the president made a special visit to Three Mile Island in order to reassure the people. But Unit 2, because of the overheated reactor core, could still melt down. The hydrogen bubble inside the reactor fuel facility, which had been preventing cooling water from reaching the upper ends of the control rods, was now being released into the atmosphere very slowly and carefully. This bubble was radioactive and had the potential to explode, and this was the first step in the planned elimination of the bubble. On March 31, children and pregnant women within five miles of the plant were advised to evacuate³⁹; and today, civil defense commanders in the counties of eastern Pennsylvania received instructions that, as a precautionary measure, everyone within a 25-mile radius should be evacuated. Those responsible for countering looting, which it was estimated might begin two or three hours after the evacuation, were to formulate plans to prevent such looting—because once all the personnel had been evacuated and the houses were empty, if people went in to smash, loot, and burn, that would be a disaster. The local milk was safe to drink, because the corn and hay the cows had eaten had been stored for several months; but no one really knew what effect the radiation might have on the unborn calves carried by the cows around the power plant area. Therefore the entire nation, and indeed the entire world, was closely watching what would ultimately happen at Three Mile Island.

Seth in fact, at the start of tonight's session, transmitted some material about attention. Then later, at 10:12, after Jane paused for a moment in trance, Seth asked Rob: "Do you have any questions?" Rob said: "I haven't had much time to think of questions, but today Jane and I talked about the relationship between Jonestown—that is, Jonestown in Guyana⁴⁰—and the nuclear plant leak at Three Mile Island, and about how these two events represent the two extremes of religion and science."

Indeed, of course you are quite right. In this case, you are also dealing with fanatical behavior.

Here both involve a closed belief system—one a closed religious belief system, the other a closed scientific belief system—and a rigid attitude, and also a state of intense emotional charge.

He said these two events both share such common features: a closed belief system, a rigid attitude, and a state of intense emotional charge, and they can almost be said to be related to compulsive behavior as well, somewhat compulsive.

The people of Jonestown believed the world was against them, including the existing establishment and the government of the country, and they displayed a paranoid tendency.

The same applies to those scientists.

He said these extreme fanatical elements of Jonestown had such a tendency. He said do scientists have such a tendency? We don't feel they do, but Seth tells you they do as well. Why? Because they now feel the cultural atmosphere is turning against them. Because of this nuclear leak incident, the whole of society is against these scientists, all saying why did you build nuclear power plants in densely populated areas, and so unsafe, so dangerous. So people no longer trust these scientists, and therefore they fear they will be pulled down from their lofty position.

So to some extent, scientists have become somewhat contemptuous of all those who do not understand their language, those non-elite people.

This is very obvious. Scientists, toward people who do not understand scientific language, scientific context, scientific knowledge, are disinclined to communicate with you. They look at you somewhat like a high school student looking at kindergarten children—very polite to you, smiling and patting your head, but inwardly thinking, what do you know.

They resent having to obtain research money from the government, from non-scientists, and their reaction has been to build up a false sense of omnipotence, so that they have not been as careful as they should have been. They instead feel misunderstood by the public.

The meaning of this passage is that scientists feel these people who do not understand science are actually the ones managing them. For example, regarding the approval of research funding, Congress or government budget approval departments deciding how much money should be allocated to this scientific research—they are extremely resentful. They feel they are being managed by people who do not understand, managing those who do understand, and they are very frustrated. Then in this anger, they develop a false sense of omnipotence—they feel that science is the most fundamental solution to the world's problems, and they are the ones who possess scientific knowledge and scientific technology, yet they are being controlled by people far inferior to them when it comes to their research funding and research materials, and this makes them very angry. Then under the control of this sense of omnipotence, when they should be careful about life and about the public, they are not so careful, there is a bit of anger in it, can you understand? So when they do scientific research, especially things like nuclear power plants that concern public life, they should be doubly careful—and yet they only achieved the care they should have had, and there is a gap here. They only achieved the care they should have had, but they were not that careful. Why? Because in their hearts, toward these publics, toward these ordinary people, they feel misunderstood, so they hold a certain prejudice against them. This subtle mentality was captured by Seth. Of course, if you ask any scientist about this, none of them would admit it; this is only their inner activity.

None of them wanted any disaster.

Yes, the scientists did not want a disaster either. But some of them thought this disaster taught people a lesson—what lesson? That people might thereby come to understand that politicians do not understand science, and that scientists should ultimately be the ones in charge.

We must have enough money, otherwise who knows what might go wrong?

This is the inner thought scientists dare not speak aloud. With this kind of nuclear leak disaster, not only does he not reflect on his own lack of care in the original design, he instead says this is also good, this lets the common people know what kind of disastrous consequences come from research funding being in the hands of politicians—if you don't give us enough funding for research, then flawed products like nuclear power plants will result. If you give us enough money, enough research funding, then such problems would not arise; if you don't give us enough money, who knows what flaws might appear next time in the airplanes we design, the ships we design, or whatever we design.

The scientific elite can certainly represent a possibility in which they create a world whose workings ordinary people cannot understand.

Scientists really have created a world whose operating mechanisms ordinary people cannot understand. For example, ordinary people today really cannot understand blockchain, Bitcoin, cryptocurrency⁴¹—the contemporary financial system and the possible future financial system—including artificial intelligence, quantum computing, quantum communication, quantum science⁴², and so on, including 3D printing, neural systems, brain-computer interfaces⁴³, and so on; these things are getting further and further away from ordinary people. In the past, people could still understand part of it through their own study or comprehension; but now the degree of difficulty for ordinary people to understand this knowledge is greater than ever before. Although there is the powerful assistant of the internet, the depth and difficulty of science has indeed exceeded the understanding of ordinary people. If you don't believe it, go grab someone on the street and ask them what quantum computing is, or what quantum communication is—see how many people can explain it clearly to you. Go grab one out of a thousand, one out of ten thousand, and see how many can clearly explain the concept to you? Not to mention the principles and their understanding—how many people can even accurately and clearly state the concept of quantum computing and quantum communication?

So most people are increasingly unable to understand the workings of our world, this world created by scientists.

Today I shared a book in the group, called The Future Is Faster Than You Think⁴⁴; you can go take a look at it. This is the Chinese edition just published in mainland China this January; the English edition came out last year. This book is by a person who studies science, and it describes the impact of science on humanity's future in a very concrete way, with detailed demonstrations. His point is that these scientific changes are right beside us, all around us, and while we are unaware, they are already undergoing exponential transformation. It is growing and transforming exponentially, and in the process of your not knowing and not understanding, they have already become part of our lives. If you are interested, you can find this book and read it.

In your country, you actually have a very good system of checks and balances, namely this existing democratic system that many of us criticize. And now, your television programs systematically show you the old movie Frankenstein.

Frankenstein is a movie⁴⁵, a very interesting old American movie; you can go find it and watch it—it portrays scientists as those strange, freakish types.

And when your science is contemplating experiments with life that all kinds of assumptions would bring about, this is not a coincidence, because the collective mind of the people is capable of making such collective lives, and those lives are heard.

What he means is that many of the experiments scientists are now doing actually concern the lives and safety of the people in society, including recent genetic technology, viral technology, and mRNA research⁴⁶, and so on—these things actually concern the lives of many people. And at this time, what is our television showing? What are our people doing? Our people are mocking these scientists; we use the movie Frankenstein⁴⁷—this is a very old movie—but we dig it out and show it in modern society. He is talking about America in 1979. At this time, we are still mocking these scientists on one side, while the scientists are doing scientific research that concerns the life and death of humanity, and building our society in ways ordinary people cannot understand.

Then Seth said, do you have any other questions? Rob said no. He said this session is now ended.

This session was very short, and then we look at the notes. The notes contain some interesting follow-ups; in fact, many notes in The "Unknown" Reality⁴⁸ are very interesting.

The first note, for example, this is what Seth said:

For example, man deals with a dual self, because he thinks of himself as an unpleasant mixture of body and mind.

People always deal with a dual self. People today are the same; many who have studied mind-body-spirit for a long time still have not learned to see themselves as a whole. They always ask what is the small self, what is the higher self, is this the will of the higher self, is this the thought of the higher self, is this the arrangement of the soul, is this the blueprint of life—they always split themselves off from the part of themselves they do not know. That part is also themselves, just a part they are unfamiliar with and do not understand; but they think that part is not them, because they treat it as their soul, their higher self, their inner self, their spirit guides, whatever spirits—they treat it as something else. Seth here points this out with one sharp stroke: we humans all have such a tendency, not to mention ordinary people, and even those who study the mind-body-spirit things I just mentioned also have this tendency.

He identifies mainly with what I call a limited portion of his consciousness.

That is, he identifies only with a very limited portion of his consciousness, and he does not identify with the part of his consciousness he does not recognize.

He calls that portion which he equates with the mind or intellect.

He regards the part he knows as the mind or intellect, and this part he identifies with; the part that exceeds this understanding of intellect and mind, he does not identify with.

He identifies with the time that he feels he can control to some extent.

He only identifies with certain times he can control; events he cannot control, he does not identify with. Very interesting, isn't it? It really is like this.

For example, people think of behavior, action, and deeds, but man does not identify with those inner processes that make action or deeds possible.

The meaning of the first sentence is that we humans acknowledge behavior, action, and deeds. Look, what our scientists study are all these external things—they study motion, force—what is force? The motion of objects, including human motion, the motion of all things—they study these motions and actions; this is what Newtonian mechanics focuses on. But what do they not study? They do not study what makes it move, what causes it to move, what the inner processes are that make it move—they instead do not study that.

What does this mean? When something moves, we think it has no regularity—then does human motion have regularity? Does human motion have purpose? Does it have meaning? Does it have thought? Yet we do not understand the thought behind human motion. All human motion is treated as objective, cold, ruthless, without thought and without emotion. They extract emotion and intention from this objective world, believing that only such a world is objective and easy to study. But if you extract the subjective and turn it into a purely objective world, does it still have meaning? Then I ask you, does it still have meaning? In such a world, where all motion, behavior, and action have no intention behind them, no thought, no belief, no driving force of their own thought and emotion—then even if you study such a world thoroughly, what meaning does it have?

Not to mention that our actions, our deeds, our accomplishments are actually not matters of this three-dimensional time and space at all; they are all results in this time and space of other time-spaces. But we simply do not consider these questions; we seek causes from results, we seek the laws within results—how can you possibly find the true laws?

They identify with what they think of as their logical thinking and reasoning abilities, and these seem to imply that he possesses a noble, cool separation from nature.

The more he does this, the more he feels he is noble, cool, and separate from nature; this is the main distinction between him and animals, and he is smug about it. But he forgets one thing: he does not identify with those processes that make his logical thinking possible—those processes are spontaneous and unconscious.

Therefore it seems that anything outside their conscious control must necessarily be undisciplined or chaotic, and completely lacking in logic.

What does this passage mean? It means that people extremely revere and endorse their own thinking and logical reasoning abilities, and modern science endorses this as well. He only acknowledges this one thing, but he does not acknowledge how thought is produced, how logic is produced, or even how your consciousness is produced, where your thoughts come from—these questions he does not discuss, he does not study, and he does not even acknowledge them. He thinks these are all results of unconsciousness, automatic and spontaneous.

Go look at what current scientists say about research on the human brain—how is consciousness produced? The result they tell you is that modern brain science believes human consciousness is a pile of external sensory stimuli exciting the brain's neurons, and in this process of stimulation, this series of stimuli together, in this process, produces consciousness. In this process of external sensory stimulation, the brain, under such random stimulation, produces consciousness—isn't this nonsense? Isn't this just nonsense? What he does not know is that even the act of seeing things, even the perception reflected by the brain from external stimuli, is the result of consciousness controlling it, not the other way around, with consciousness being their product. The reason you can see is because you have consciousness; this is a very core issue here. But they do not think so; they insist on attributing what this thinking and logic produces to a pile of unconscious, undisciplined, chaotic things lacking logic; and then within this chaotic, disorderly, logic-lacking mess, human wisdom and logic of such height is instead produced—isn't this self-satire? How could such logical wisdom possibly be produced from a pile of disorder? He cannot even explain it himself, but he insists on believing this, insists on thinking this way. And not only does he think this way, he forces the whole world and all of humanity to think this way—because they are scientists, you must listen to me; if you don't listen to me, you are anti-science, pseudo-science, folk science, so he slaps a bunch of labels on you.

Both religion and science are built upon this belief.

What belief? That those things they do not understand, those things they cannot control, they consider to be chaotic, unconscious, and completely without logic. Science and religion, the two of them appear to be completely opposite sides, two that look down on each other completely, but the foundations on which these two are built are the same; they are both built upon the same belief.

Religion is the same. Religion considers that the things it cannot explain clearly, the things it cannot control, are all bad, all things that should not exist, or should not be present. For example, regarding emotions and feelings, these most natural human responses—religion cannot explain them, or they do not match its logic, so what does it do? It strikes you down with one blow; it says none of these are wanted, these are things only lowly humans have; what should we noble humans be? We should be noble, cool, and separate from nature; we are human, we should not have such lowly things. So religion and science are the same; from this angle, aren't their viewpoints identical?

Anything that happens spontaneously is viewed with suspicion, because the word "spontaneous" seems to imply some element of being out of control, a movement from one extreme to another.

As soon as he says spontaneous, he thinks it will either rush to this side or rush to that side, completely uncontrollable; only the rules of science or religion can keep people in a relatively centered attitude. And then it seems that only the ideal mind has concepts like order, discipline, and control.

Yes, both science and religion think this way. Think carefully: what does religion emphasize? It emphasizes precepts; it absolutely emphasizes precepts; without precepts there is no order, and you cannot possibly practice. So every religion has its own precepts, whether Christianity, Islam, or Buddhism. Take Buddhism, which everyone is familiar with: it puts precepts first, called precepts, concentration, wisdom: without precepts there can be no concentration, without concentration you cannot give rise to wisdom; if you cannot even accomplish the first step, don't talk about the rest. Then you go observe those Buddhist precepts—look at the precepts in there—starting from the basic five precepts to the ten precepts⁴⁹, and then more and more, higher and higher precepts; in the end, if you follow the 250 precepts⁵⁰ of a monk, and complete them all, and for women the bhikkhuni precepts are even more numerous⁵¹, more than for men—if you carry them all out, see what you will become?

Science is the same; science does not have such precepts, but it has other precepts—it has all kinds of scientific laws, and scientific things are very rigidly defined. In other words, as long as something is not material, it does not discuss it; isn't this an ironclad precept? Yes. Anything that cannot be repeatedly verified in scientific experiments cannot be called science; isn't this an iron law? Yes. As long as it is not this, it does not study it; it thinks you cannot be called science. Then can only what is repeatable be called science? What is repeatable is called a robot, not science. The world you build according to such laws that can only be repeatedly verified must be a mechanical world; it must be a world that can only repeatedly do certain things; it is something without creativity, without soul, without life. Because the keynote of your research, the iron law at the very beginning of your research, has already defined it; the science produced under such a foundational iron law can only be this kind of science. Can there be a science of the soul? Can there be a science of life? No, because he does not study those things at all; those things have all been thrown away by him, excluded.

So these two, religion and science—Seth, from his perspective, regards them as the same thing; isn't this very ironic?

Therefore man, within his own mind, has doomed himself to work against his own nature.

For this reason, man works against his own nature. This is the entanglement and vexation that arises when man looks at himself in a dualistic way. And he thinks he must control his nature—very interesting. Man feels he must control his own nature; you come from nature, and you still want to control it; your life, everything about you is born from this nature, and then you turn around, once your wings are grown, and want to control it—aren't you playing a joke on yourself?

But the fact is that man's consciousness can indeed become aware of those spontaneous processes.

People begin to observe those spontaneous processes, very interesting. But he has already largely closed the door of understanding. His so-called observation of these spontaneous processes is done from his narrow angle; in this process of observation, he has already closed the great door through which he might have understood, so no matter how much he observes, he cannot understand, because he goes with very strong prejudice and narrow viewpoints.

Therefore he identifies only with the reason he identifies with, and tries as much as possible to forget the spontaneous processes upon which the mind rides so triumphantly.

Seth's metaphor here is very vivid. He says scientists only identify with reason, and they forget what this reason is—reason is what we call the mind, riding triumphantly upon those spontaneous processes, and it is those spontaneous processes that produced reason and mind and rationality. You use your own logic, your ego's wisdom, to smugly examine, observe, and perceive those so-called spontaneous processes, the so-called roots and origins of human life—when you study them, don't forget who you are riding on? You are riding precisely on those spontaneous processes that produced your wisdom, your cognition, your logical thinking ability, and yet you turn around and use it to study spontaneity. A bit ironic? Yes, we are exactly that ironic. So remember Seth's metaphor; it is very vivid: the mind rides triumphantly upon spontaneity.

Then we look at the second note. So you see, aren't these notes very interesting? If you don't read the notes and only read the main text, then such wonderful material is lost. Including what was discussed earlier in Session 840, the notes there were the most core part of that session. The content after Session 845, he put it in the notes.

Jane wrote that when Rob went out for a walk, she was watching television. As she sat there, she began to receive from Seth more material on one of the themes mentioned in the session, but the material came in conceptual form rather than as Seth's finished manuscript. When Rob returned, she told him about it, and this morning she wanted to see how much of the concept Seth had given her she could recall. Below is Jane's own understanding of a concept Seth gave her after Session 845 ended.

Jane said:

The concept Seth gave was that the scientists' belief system would inevitably cause certain destructive behavior.

Below is Jane's understanding of that concept:

The implied mentality of today's scientists, their implied, unspoken mentality, causes them to be less careful with life than they should be, and in a way separates them from nature, causing them to hold individual lives, living beings, somewhat in contempt.

This is exactly the part I interpreted for you earlier, isn't it? Seth was afraid they hadn't understood, so he came back and gave another lesson—telling him that this is how it is.

Religious fanatic leaders, such as the leader of Jonestown, exaggerated brotherly love, while at the same time, for example, forbidding one person's natural expression of love toward another, attacking family relationships.

What then is the result?

That kind of idealized love became more and more remote and unattainable, while guilt and despair also deepened more and more.

Because we do not yet understand the whole background and process of Jonestown, let us not expand on it for now. From Seth's statement you can see that, in that so-called fanatical organization at Jonestown, what did they emphasize? They emphasized the so-called pure love between people, a love that transcends race, transcends romantic love between men and women, and transcends family love. They believed this love was what mattered, what should be emphasized, protected as a priority, and promoted; while the smaller family love, romantic love between men and women, they felt should be abandoned, even forbidden, and attacked. This same problem exists in many sects. But this kind of problem is as if they are promoting a great love, when in fact they have gone astray, gone in reverse, diminished love, narrowed it, and made it too restricted. In order to promote this brotherly love, to promote comradely love within a certain organization, they ignored the ordinary human feelings between people--romantic love between men and women, between husband and wife, father and daughter, mother and son, family and so on--and they placed all of these beneath that. What they emphasized first was the love within their organization.

What does this kind of result lead to? It leads to these people eventually not even knowing what love is anymore. Day after day they shout slogans about our brotherly love, our brotherly feeling, just like that. As a result, in the short term it seems very effective; this kind of organization seems very cohesive in the short term. After a long time it collapses; it will collapse on its own, and you do not even need to do anything. Why does it collapse? Because it is contrary to human nature. As Seth said earlier, it works against its own nature, and this is the fundamental reason for its collapse. A person cannot keep working against his own nature forever. Why? Do not forget what you are riding on: you are riding on your own nature, and if you keep fighting your own nature every day, what good outcome will you get? Sooner or later nature will throw you right off.

So the example he gives actually wants to tell us that scientists and these religious leaders are the same--the same in what way? In that their love for the public is distorted. Scientists do not really love the public that much, even though they wave the slogan that it is for the better development of humanity and for the contribution to human society. So this is what Seth has been saying all along: this is their hidden intention, which he will not state openly. Even today, if you ask any scientist, or if you use this view to talk with a scientist, he will only scold you: you really measure a gentleman's heart with a petty man's mind; our scientists' ideals are so grand and great, we work tirelessly day and night for the well-being of humanity, and you still try to guess our intentions with such thoughts. Therefore Seth says this is their hidden intention.

He will talk about this later. Earlier Seth has been emphasizing one point: we can never, for the sake of a lofty purpose, or a larger purpose, allow the process itself to become unreasonable--this is the main thing we need to emphasize. We cannot ignore the process itself for the sake of the goal; we cannot do bad things for a lofty purpose; that is not acceptable. This is what he will discuss later, a common mistake made by both scientific fanatics and religious fanatics. One of these mistakes is right here. In the earlier chapters it was mentioned, and you may not have paid attention--one characteristic of us fanatics is doing anything for the goal, and moreover they believe this is a truth. Take a careful look at yourself: do you have this belief? To achieve a larger goal, is it acceptable to do things by any means? If you have that, change it quickly, otherwise you will go down a very terrible wrong path.

So the two are the same. For a common goal--scientists for the purpose of studying science, religious leaders because they believe they are leading people into a purer, higher organization or a greater love--they then begin to act against human nature, or to ignore the most basic human qualities in other people.

In the same way, the scientific community speaks of man triumphing over the planet, with a naturally grandiose ideal.

Our scientists say "man will conquer Heaven"--is not "man will conquer Heaven" often said? What is Heaven? Heaven represents the natural world--all these are that kind of grandiose ideal. Is it laughable? Of course it is. Where did human beings come from? From nature. What does it mean to conquer nature? You conquer the very source from which you emerged--can you conquer it? If you conquer that source, it means you also disappear.

At the same time, these ideals further separate scientists from the everyday practical experience of their fellow human beings.

For the sake of man conquering nature, he feels that the small feelings and sentiments of daily life, ordinary people's lives, daily necessities, the warmth of human life--none of these are important. For this lofty ideal, all these can be sacrificed; they can be treated as costs, as the costs to be paid no matter what the price.

And since they regard animals as objects, they will necessarily view human life in the same way.

When scientists do animal experiments, they really treat animals as objects, really without any pity--look closely at those who experiment on animals and you will know. For example, in a nuclear energy accident, if several thousand or tens of thousands of human lives are sacrificed, in their minds this can be completely rationalized. They feel this is the cost, the indispensable cost of scientific development; there is no way around it, if you want science to develop you have to pay a price, and these human lives are the price.

If it is a method directed toward the lofty goal of learning that man conquers nature, then once again, this intention automatically turns them into mechanics.

Wanting man to conquer nature, this intention automatically turns scientists into mechanics and turns our world into a large machine.

The scientist is weighed down by this alienation.

He himself is also weighed down by this sense of alienation--what is this burden? It is that if I build the world into a machine, a complete and smoothly running precision machine, then where is our humanity? He himself can also feel this alienation.

And in his heart, he must hope that his task fails.

Very interesting. In his heart, this is something he is unwilling to admit--he must hope that his task fails. Because if his task succeeds, then in the world of belief he would have effectively separated human beings from human nature; philosophically speaking, that is equivalent to casting human beings aside like meaningless psychological fragments and letting them drift.

Therefore the scientific community often trips itself up.

This is a point that not even scientists themselves have discovered, and Seth directly points it out. That is, scientists are torn inwardly--he is talking about a group, a group consciousness; within this group of scientists there is inner conflict: on the one hand they want to develop their science and technology at high speed, and on the other hand they vaguely feel that if this kind of technological development continues, it will directly wipe out human nature. This is the same as what we say about the threat of artificial intelligence to humanity. So you see now within the scientific community, a large number of people jump out directly to oppose artificial intelligence.

So here Seth says that, at a level of consciousness unknown to scientists themselves, the scientific community often sabotages itself, trips itself up, and keeps itself from developing so fast. Is this not interesting? Probably even scientists themselves would never expect such a result: insiders undermining insiders. Because he carries a very great inner burden that he cannot bear. So while he is doing scientific research, at the same time he is thinking: do not let the research succeed, please do not really let it succeed--even though this is his research direction, this is his livelihood, and this is also the ideal he strives for, there is still a voice in his heart telling him: do not make it succeed; do not let artificial intelligence succeed; if it succeeds, everything is finished. He is in this kind of inner conflict, sometimes thinking one way, sometimes the other.

Session 846

Session 846 began at 9:38 p.m. on Wednesday, April 4, 1979. By this time the Three Mile Island crisis had passed. The danger of an immediate catastrophe from the possible meltdown of the Number 2 unit's nuclear reactor at that nuclear power plant had passed -- the temperature had already come down. Engineers were already working to eliminate the hydrogen bubble in the reactor core, though the core temperature was still considerably higher than normal, and children and pregnant women were still being advised not to approach the area. This was the larger background: this nuclear leak disaster, after several days of handling, had basically been brought under control.

Then Seth said:

The Jonestown disaster occurred long after we began this book, but in another recent event, an accident at a nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, nearly turned into a catastrophe.

If it had not been brought under control, it would have become a catastrophe.

In my other books, I have seldom commented on public events of any kind.

So he basically does not comment on your human events. Because he must abide by one of his most fundamental principles: you cannot come here and point fingers, and even more so, you cannot influence the course of a specific historical event by your presence -- because the moment you add a comment, the moment you say something, you have defined the nature of that event, or even revealed some of the deeper causes behind it, and that would affect the entire course of human civilization. So this is something he generally rarely does; he has almost never done anything of this sort.

But he said:

This book, however, is specifically devoted to discussing the interactions that occur between individual and mass experience, and therefore we must deal with your national dreams and their materialization in private and public life.

What does "national dreams" mean? It means that whether it is your Jonestown or the Three Mile Island incident, these are all public, national dreams, or one could also call them a collective subconscious. And when they materialize in our private lives and public lives, when they become events, that is what this book is going to discuss. He puts it in scientific terms:

In the Jonestown disaster, there was no threat of fallout involved, but at Three Mile Island there was indeed such a threat of fallout.

Fallout is something that only exists with a nuclear leak -- nuclear-contaminated air floating in the sky, those particles carrying nuclear radiation falling to the ground, which would produce a massive disaster for our human society. This is also one of the serious after-effects following an atomic bomb explosion. If this nuclear power plant had exploded, then the surrounding area within a radius of several hundred miles would have been affected by this fallout.

But of course there was a psychological fallout.

See how well he uses this metaphor. What is psychological fallout?

People in all walks of life across the nation would feel affected; the suicides of these several hundred people produced an impact on everyone's psyche.

Just as the nuclear radiation dust produced by a nuclear explosion falls upon the earth and affects human material life, in the same way, it produced an impact on people's psyches.

The Jonestown situation did involve all the characteristics I have described as belonging to a fanatical sect.

Within it there was fanaticism, a closed mental environment, and the arousal of hope toward some ideal, and this hope seemed impossible to achieve because of too much focus on all the obstacles that appeared to stand in the way. This is a very typical case of a fanatical sect -- there was fanaticism in it, there was a closed mental environment, and it also aroused hope toward some ideal, and the reason this hope was not achieved was because he focused too much on the obstacles that seemed to stand between him and the hope. He placed his focus of attention entirely on the villains who were always out to harm him; he always felt that there were always people obstructing him in the middle of realizing his ideal, and he placed all his focus on the obstacles, until finally he himself collapsed. If he placed all his attention there, then he saw everyone as an obstacle -- he saw the entire world, the American government, the other American people, and so on, all as obstacles.

All right, seeing this, if you have experienced or heard about the Cultural Revolution in mainland China⁵², you should have some feelings about it. That ten-year catastrophe lasted far too long, but the entire thinking and process was exactly the same as this fanatical sect, this fanaticism. In a closed environment -- was China at that time a closed environment? Yes, there was no external exchange at that time. Why was there no exchange? Previously it had exchanges with the Soviet Union, but after falling out with the Soviet Union in the early sixties, it no longer exchanged with the Soviet Union either, and it had even less contact with American imperialism, and no contact with other countries either, so it became a completely closed viewpoint, somewhat like present-day North Korea. In a closed environment, for the sake of some ideal, moving toward some ideal, such a fanatical movement occurred. Regarding this, young people who are not familiar with the history of the Cultural Revolution can go search for it⁵³; those of a certain age should have some feeling about it.

Most of these fanatical sects have their own particular language, specific sentences repeated over and over.

Does this sound familiar? Quotations painted on walls, quotations printed in books, having to recite quotations before buying anything, and if you could not recite the quotations you were not allowed to buy things -- these are sentences repeated over and over. Does it resemble it? Then you understand; it is the same. Do not think it is so miraculous, so fresh, so revolutionary; these things have been repeatedly staged throughout human history. The reason we study these things today is precisely to avoid this, so that in the future when we see this kind of behavior, we can recognize it at a glance -- what they are doing, what they want to do; as soon as the first signs appear, we can understand.

And this special language further separates the devotees from the rest of the world.

Because he speaks a language different from others, and only repeats these few phrases, over and over just these few sentences, the world becomes only these few sentences, so he is certainly cut off from the rest of the world.

This practice was also followed by those in Jonestown, where loyalty to friends and family was not encouraged.

Does this sound very familiar? Very familiar, right? During the Cultural Revolution, sons reported their fathers, daughters reported their mothers; there were far too many such cases. At dinner in the evening, parents would chat about their own views on the day's verbal attacks and armed struggles -- because they might not be able to stand it; after all, it was something against human nature, such as young people beating their teachers -- and these things could not be said outside, so when they came home for dinner, just between themselves and their child, the husband and wife would exchange a few words: "Look at so-and-so today, old Wang is actually a decent person." Just a few sentences of chat like that. Fine, the next day the child went to school and reported you: "Last night my dad said that old Wang is actually quite pitiful." Well then, old Wang is a class enemy; what is there to pity? You sympathize with a class enemy, are you also a class enemy? They directly took his father away and locked him in the cowshed. And the child was still smug about it: look how high my political consciousness is, I even reported my own father, I renounced my family for the sake of justice. This kind of thing sounds ridiculous to you now, but at the time during the Cultural Revolution it was everywhere, far too common.

So you will find that their nature is the same. Seth's depiction of these fanatical sects is absolutely piercing. Loyalty to friends and family was not encouraged; you had to be loyal to the organization. How could you be loyal to your family? Loyal to your friends? You had to be loyal to the organization first.

Therefore, those in Jonestown had left strong intimate ties behind them, and were more loyal to their organization. They felt threatened by the world, but that world was one drawn by their own beliefs.

There was never a world threatening them; it was their own beliefs that depicted a world opposing them. When I say this now, can you match every single item with China during the Cultural Revolution? At that time they believed the whole world was opposing China, and China still had to go rescue all the suffering people of the whole world -- those people were perfectly happy, yet they depicted it as if all the people of the world were suffering, and only the Chinese people were the happiest, and through our own struggle we must not only liberate ourselves but also liberate all humanity. Was this not a world depicted by themselves? They depicted it this way, and everyone believed it too; everyone thought this way. This is very similar to Jonestown.

Therefore it presented a picture of unmitigated evil and corruption.

Because they thought this way, they felt that this world was full of evil, that this world was corrupt, that it all needed them to save it, that they were the best, the purest, that their ideals were the most noble, that their behavior was the most sincere, the most simple, the most worthy of being esteemed by the whole world. The world outside of them was simply filthy, evil beyond measure, not worth mentioning.

All of this has by now been seen very clearly; that situation led to the deaths of over a hundred people.

Now that the Jonestown affair is over, we as bystanders can see it very clearly, just as we now look back and examine the Cultural Revolution. But at the time, those who were caught up in it could not see it.

Harrisburg, that is, this nuclear leak, this situation could have threatened the lives of several thousand people, and in that kind of event, the characteristics of a fanatical sect are less easily discovered.

In this nuclear leak affair, it seems there was no relation to any fanatical sect, so they were not easily discovered, but the attributes of a fanatical sect were there.

You have scientific fanatical sects, just as you have religious fanatical sects.

There are scientific fanatical sects; we do not feel it, and science itself does not admit that it is as fanatical as a religious fanatical sect. This is the problem humanity now faces -- science has already become like a fanatical religious sect, with exclusivity pushed to the extreme.

Religion and science both loudly proclaim their own pursuit of truth, although they appear to be involved in completely opposite systems.

They each look down on the other, but they both firmly claim that they stand on the side of truth, that they are both pursuing truth. Science looks down on religion extremely, feeling that it is all ghosts and spirits, utterly ignorant, believing that people who believe in religion are utterly ignorant people. And religious people look down even more on those who study science, saying that you simply do not understand the truth of the world, that you only study these so-called logics, these theories, and you simply do not know what the world is. A phrase religious people often use to mock science is: "When scientists exhaust every effort to climb to the top of the mountain, they find religion already sitting there waiting for them."

But the two of them both treat their beliefs as truth; the two of them are the same thing -- no one may alter them, no one may tamper with their truth. Change one thing, and at best you will be scolded and expelled from the organization; at worst, your life may be lost. So the truth they uphold is something no one may challenge.

They began to seek beginnings and endings.

Here he uses a very, very funny way of putting it: religion and science are both searching for how this world began and how it will end. Is that not funny? Science insists on telling you that this universe must have had a beginning; when you tell it that this universe has no beginning and no end, it cannot accept it; it calls this anti-science, calls it pseudoscience. From the viewpoint of us scientists, there must be a beginning and there must be an end -- beginning with the Big Bang, and finally ending with the exhaustion of the universe's energy. What does religion think? Religion is the same; religion believes the world was created by God, and then in the end there will be a destruction, and after the destruction of the world there will be a judgment day, and after judgment day God will say who goes to heaven and who goes to hell, and this world will be gone. So you see, science and religion are doing the same thing; they are both seeking the beginning and the end of this universe. From this point, they are consistent. Funny, right?

Scientists have their own vocabulary, they have their own contextual vocabulary, which is used to reinforce the exclusivity of scientists.

As long as what you say is not the same as what they say, they exclude you just the same. Is this not especially like the special language of religious fanatical sects? Except they do not repeat those sentences over and over, but they do emphasize these things. The language they speak is something you cannot understand; they deliberately create words you cannot understand -- things they could explain clearly they do not explain clearly, insisting on using vocabulary you cannot comprehend to explain it, in order to exclude you from it.

Here, I am speaking again of the general system of science, for in a manner of speaking, there is indeed a scientific establishment, which is the result of each individual scientist's participation. A scientist may behave quite differently in his family life than he does as a scientist; for example, he may love his family dog, but at the same time, within his professional sphere, he does not consider it wrong to inject pathogens directly into animals.

Think about it: how is cancer cured in animals? You first have to make the animal get cancer, or get some kind of disease. So he will inject those pathogens directly into animals, making the animals sick, and then observe them. He says what is wrong with injecting these pathogens directly into animals?

A scientist is one way at home, and another way in the scientific laboratory. At home he can have a humane side; when he goes into the scientific laboratory he puts away his humane side. The moment he puts on that white coat, the moment he enters the laboratory, the white coat goes on and his humanity is gone; he walks with the stride of someone who has disowned all his relatives -- puts on the white coat, puts on the glasses, puts on the gloves, and begins doing animal experiments. At this moment there is no humanity in his heart, no nature; and he feels so professional, so aloof, so refined. There are also many scientists who do science by day, and at night go home and join new religions, attending church more diligently than anyone.

Nevertheless, no matter how you put it, fanatical sects will interact with each other.

Remember this: fanatical sects interact with and echo each other. Think carefully about the point in time when Jonestown happened, and think carefully about the point in time when the Cultural Revolution happened. At the same time as the Cultural Revolution was happening, were there similar things happening elsewhere in the world?

Between a religion operating like a fanatical sect, and a science operating like a fanatical sect, the relationship is not shallow.

Seth's words here are quite cutting. He draws an equal sign between the ignorant fanatical religion and the scientists we especially believe in and worship -- although he does not draw an equal sign, he uses the phrase "the relationship is not shallow," and with this one sentence he pulls you back -- there is no essential difference, is there? Inwardly, it is just that what they believe is different; the behavioral pattern is exactly the same.

Now, your fanatical religion exists in response to the fanatical behavior of science.

He says why is their relationship not shallow? It is not that they have an inner connection, nor that these scientists will take off their white coats and become leaders of fanatical organizations -- that will not happen; they still have that scientific literacy -- but he says the reason this relationship is not shallow lies in this: it is precisely because these fanatical scientists exist that these fanatical religions are stimulated into existence. The more fanatical our science becomes, the greater the rebound of fanaticism on the religious level, because your science does not respect the human part, and religion insists on amplifying that part; the two of them are locked in a tit-for-tat confrontation: you are fanatical, I am even more fanatical than you.

Science insists that it does not deal with questions of value, and leaves those to the philosophers.

Scientists say I am detached from the world; I do not discuss questions of thought and philosophy; I only discuss the laws by which this world operates. But is that how it is? It is not.

It uses its own so-called scientific statements, scientific papers, scientific conclusions to prove that this universe is an accidental creation, that the universe was formed by a merciless master, a meaningless accidental conglomeration.

This is modern scientists' description of the birth of our current universe.

This science states very clearly its belief -- that the universe and human existence have no value.

This is the current viewpoint of scientists.

All that remains is whatever pleasure and achievement can be barely obtained from individual human survival, from individual biological processes.

This is that line Bi Shumin said: life originally has no meaning; we find a little meaning for ourselves. That is how it is; this is what our science, our current mainstream social consciousness transmits to us. From his perspective, it is indeed like this: an accidental universe produced by an accidental chance, an accidental life, an accidental birth of humanity; within this string of accidents, do you think these accidents mean anything? Since all of this is accidental, human existence is also an accidental result, and it has no meaning either.

In a national magazine, there was recently an article called "High Spirited," which talked about a recent direction of progress in the field of psychology, saying that people will come to understand that their emotions, thoughts, and feelings are the result of the dance of chemicals spinning in their brains. This statement demeans human subjective events.

Seth's range of reading is quite broad; how did he come to read these articles, I do not know; in his spare time he reads newspapers and such. You see, he knew there was an article called "High Spirited." If it were now, Seth would be exhausted to death -- with so much material on the internet, if he went every day to watch this video, watch that video, look at this person's Douyin, look at that person's Weibo, it would exhaust him to death. At that time there were probably only so many magazines and so many newspapers; he could still keep up with them.

He is attacking this article. The meaning of this article is that human emotions, feelings, and such are all the result of certain chemical components spinning and dancing in the brain. Humanity still thinks this way now, and still thinks this way to this day -- believing that we are controlled by these chemical substances in the brain, that endorphins, dopamine, and the amounts of these things determine whether a person is happy or blissful, or suffering or sorrowful. A couple of days ago I watched a very interesting video saying that humans have a gene lock, and the gene lock is locked; how do you open the gene lock? Through endorphins -- endorphins are things that make people suffer, but however much a person suffers, the body will secrete a corresponding amount of dopamine to balance it, so many people pursue suffering. If you follow this line of research, there are many, many strange conclusions. If you do not know what a gene lock is, search for it online; this is a current mainstream viewpoint, believing that humans have a gene lock, and once it is opened, humans will be infinitely happy.

Scientists claim they possess a great idealism; they claim they are on the road to truth, and their truth is found by studying the objective world, the world of objects, including animals and stars, galaxies and mice. In their view, however, these objects seem to have no fixed value in themselves, as if their existence had no meaning.

This one blow kills the scientists. Scientists have their own ideals, wanting to study the truth of this world, but the things they study are all dead things; what can they possibly find? What you study are objects; you study mice and galaxies, the sun, moon, and stars, Saturn, Jupiter, the solar system, molecules, atoms, protons, various particles, various natural phenomena -- are you not just picking on the soft targets? Why do you not study human consciousness, human thought, and other human abilities? You study these things and you think you have grasped the truth? You throw away human subjectivity, human emotions, human intentions; you discard all subjective things from a world that is a fusion of the subjective and the objective, leaving only an objective world, and you study it thoroughly -- then what meaning does it have? Why do you not dare to study subjective things? This is the sorrow and the absurdity of today's scientists.

Those beliefs, then, separate man from his own nature.

It is the scientists' own beliefs that separate themselves from their own nature.

Man cannot trust himself, for who can depend upon the accidental boiling and bubbling of hormones and chemicals that somehow form a stew called consciousness?

Here Seth said this with a louder voice and a sarcastic tone. According to the viewpoint of your human scientists, we humans are nothing more than certain chemical elements in the brain, which under some unknown stimulation undergo changes in trace elements -- changes in hormones, in hormones and such -- and then somehow form this consciousness -- and this consciousness, formed somehow, carries this pile of flesh and this pile of chemical substances formed somehow, constantly reacting, mutually stimulating, reacting again, stimulating again, like a pot of stewed pig's head meat bubbling and boiling in a pot. In the eyes of scientists, a human being is just this kind of thing.

That consciousness, at most, is just a pot of stew that does not taste very good.

According to you scientists, a human being is just a pile of rotten meat stewed together, with some hormones added inside, and then somehow consciousness pops out of it -- consciousness can perhaps be understood as the bubbles in that pot of stew.

Therefore the scientific establishment forever avoids opening itself to any great view of the meaning of life.

You see, he says forever -- it absolutely refuses to discuss this question, absolutely refuses to discuss views on the meaning of life, views that discuss the meaning of life; it is completely closed.

They cannot respect life, and therefore in their pursuit of ideals, they can indeed, within their philosophy, rationalize the possibility of an accident that might kill many, many people, directly or indirectly, and also kill unborn fetuses.

This needs no explanation; it is plain language, very simple.

To put it more directly, if you have read A Brief History of Tomorrow, written by Harari⁵⁴, the depiction there is even more tragic. Future humans will be divided into several major categories: one kind is what are called god-men, who, with brain-computer interfaces plus the support of artificial intelligence, possess extraordinary abilities, and these people will rule the entire society and the world; the rest are ordinary people without such abilities, who can only do basic labor or hard labor, or may not even be needed for that, because many jobs will already be done by robots. Then how will these people live? Each one will be shut in a small, enclosed cubicle, fitted with something like a game-console brain-computer interface, letting them live in virtual, brainwave-stimulated or chemical-stimulated brain illusions, letting them pass their entire lives this way. Then tubes for infusions will be inserted into them, catheters, feeding tubes, nutrition tubes; these people will lie there like a pile of maggots, from birth to death -- because they are of no use to society; work is done by robots, management is done by the combination of artificial intelligence and the god-men, and the remaining common masses, well, when they die they can still be used as fertilizer. There are many science fiction films about similar things; you can look for them. There is one called Black Mirror⁵⁵, which has some surreal episodes that are very interesting, telling roughly similar things; there is also an animated film that seems to tell this kind of thing too, but I cannot remember which animated film it was.

So you will understand that if scientists keep developing in this direction, they simply do not respect human life; they will not respect life, because within their belief system, because they have already separated themselves from their own nature, they feel that human life is not important. In their grand goal of pursuing the truth of the world, human life can be sacrificed -- is this not like many religions, where in order to pursue religious truth, you may kill certain people as sacrifices, or kill certain people to offer them to certain gods, often throwing virgin boys and girls into rivers or into the sea? It is the same; there is no essential difference.

In the plans of science, that possibility is indeed expressed, and when disasters occur, there are plans to take steps, but they are flawed plans. Therefore in your world, that possibility exists, and it is no secret.

What possibility? That the development of science will lead to human death -- that it may kill many, many people directly or indirectly; this possibility exists, and it is no secret. To this day it is still the same.

As a group, scientists fiercely oppose telepathy or clairvoyance; any philosophy that brings these into focus fills them with boundless rage.

As long as you try to bring it into the realm of scientific research and discussion, they become extremely angry, extremely furious. Only recently have some scientists begun to think about it.

Only recently have some scientists begun to think about this idea of new influencers.

Some scientists are studying the idea of telepathy -- now scientists are studying, for example, wearing a helmet, and through the capture of brain waves, allowing a person to manipulate, without contact, the takeoff and landing of an airplane, and so on. But even such a possibility deeply confuses them, deeply troubles them, because this kind of research shatters their cognition and the foundation of their beliefs, so they firmly deny it.

Scientists have long stood on the side of intellect and reason, logical thinking and objectivity. They have been trained to be unemotional, to stand outside their experience, to separate themselves from nature, and to look with a mocking, ironic eye at any emotional characteristics of their own.

Not only do they still do this, they even mock their own emotions -- he himself has lived into a state with no humanity, and he himself does not even realize it, and he even mocks those who have emotions.

Again, they declare that they are neutral in the world of values.

They declare that they are neutral. Are they neutral? Do you think, through Seth's analysis, do you think "neutral" can be added? Not neutral at all, but he himself claims to be neutral.

Until recently, they have become a new priesthood.

Seth's words here are really harsh, really cutting. What is a priest? A priest is a person who presides over ancient religious rituals. A so-called priest must kill something as an offering. He says scientists have become these priests -- using human blood, using life as sacrifice, in their pursuit of so-called scientific truth.

It seems as if all problems can be solved by scientists, and this applies to every aspect of life.

Scientists are now omnipotent, there is nothing they cannot solve. This applies to matters related to health, social unrest, economics, even war and peace -- all must be referred to the opinions of scientists. These fanatics, do you think they can lead humanity to any good place?

How could these scientific gentlemen, with all their precise paraphernalia, with all their objective and rational viewpoints, produce an accident such as a nuclear power plant that goes wrong and threatens present and future life? And what can the people who live nearby do?

He is being sarcastic again. He says these so-called scientific gentlemen -- he is still using a sarcastic tone -- with their precise paraphernalia. Paraphernalia includes their titles, their titles, they are this or that scientist, such intimidating titles appearing before you. And with all their objective and rational viewpoints -- if this were the case, if they were all objective and all rational, then how could a nuclear power plant appear that could threaten everyone's lives? If, as they say, all of this is objective and rational, then how could such an accident that threatens people's lives still occur? What is the implication behind his words? The implication is that these people do not value human life, which has led to the possibility of such nuclear power plant accidents. Now you know what he means: he and the religious fanatic leader of Jonestown who made 900 people commit suicide, and this nuclear power plant, if it really exploded and caused thousands of people to lose their lives, are essentially very similar, internally consistent -- that is, they do not care whether the people live or die, they do not care about life, they do not value life, they only care about their ideals. As long as their ideals can be realized, nothing else matters.

This article, this session, actually opens up a topic. It sounds an alarm for all of us: no matter how lofty this ideal is, no matter how it is said to be for the development of humanity, for the well-being of humanity, for whatever of humanity, no matter how lofty it is said to be, just remember -- as long as this ideal, in its implementation, does not take into account the rationality of the behavior in its process, and it only emphasizes the loftiness of its ideal, then this ideal is not worth following, and it should be overthrown, it should be subverted. The ideal itself is not wrong, this must be remembered -- it is the methods used in its implementation that are wrong, it ignores the rationality of the process and only emphasizes the loftiness of the ideal.

So what this session teaches us is such a core belief. Everyone must firmly and deeply remember it. In your future life, in society, when you encounter such problems, such groups, and such organizations, you will be able to tell at a glance what they really are. And do not be superstitious about those sciences either; they are the same.

注释与核实

1. Source: Jacob N. Kinnard, "Indra" (https://www.encyclopedia.com/philosophy-and-religion/eastern-religions/hinduism/indra) ↩

2. Source: BasharTV, "Accelerating ET Contact" (2006) (https://tv.bashar.org/checkout/new?o=rp3380044) ↩

3. Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, "Axis Alliance in World War II" (https://encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/axis-powers-in-world-war-ii) ↩

4. Source: Al Jazeera, "Eight on trial in France in connection with murder of teacher Samuel Paty" (https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/11/4/eight-on-trial-in-france-in-connection-with-murder-of-teacher-samuel-paty) ↩ ↩²

5. Source: Brian Dodwell, "The Paris Attack: A Campaign and its Goals" (https://ctc.westpoint.edu/?p=35064) ↩

6. According to Mike's original words: "And then there was this French comics publisher at the time, which drew some cartoons, also satirizing this Islamic leader, and the people associated with this comics publisher were all wanted by various Islamic countries." Upon verification, it should be: "The French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo was attacked for publishing cartoons of Muhammad, but the 'wanted/kill list' targeting its staff was issued by a terrorist organization, not by Islamic countries: in March 2013, Al-Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP) published a kill list in its English-language magazine Inspire, including editor Charb (Stéphane Charbonnier), who was killed in the Charlie Hebdo shooting on January 7, 2015." (Source: Wikipedia, "Charb," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charb) ↩

7. According to Mike's original words: "That was in the 1970s, an organization of more than 900 people still had about forty million or four million in its accounts." Upon verification, it should be: "After the Jonestown incident in 1978, the assets liquidated from Peoples Temple amounted to about 10 million USD (by the end of 1978, preliminary findings showed over 8.5 million USD, including more than 930,000 in cash at Jonestown, over 2.04 million at Swiss Bank Corporation, and over 5.24 million at Union Bank of Switzerland; the final receiver recovered about 10 million USD, or about 13 million with principal and interest), neither forty million nor four million." (Source: San Diego State University Jonestown Institute, "How much did Peoples Temple have in assets at the time of the deaths in Jonestown? Where did it go afterwards?", https://jonestown.sdsu.edu/?page_id=35330) ↩

8. This claim could not be verified. ↩

9. This claim could not be verified. ↩

10. According to Mike's original words: "Jobs went to college for one year, then went to India to practice for one year." Upon verification, it should be: "Jobs enrolled at Reed College in the fall of 1972, dropped out after only one semester (though he remained on campus as an auditor for about a year and a half), and in 1974 went to India seeking spiritual practice for about seven months, not one year." (Source: Wikipedia, "Steve Jobs," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs) ↩

11. According to Mike's original words: "Jobs went to college for one year, then went to India to practice for one year." Upon verification, it should be: "After entering Reed College in 1972, Jobs formally attended for only one semester before dropping out (then audited classes on campus for about a year), and in mid-1974 went to India seeking enlightenment, returning to the United States about seven months later; he did not complete one year of college or practice in India for one year." (Source: Wikipedia, "Steve Jobs," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steve_Jobs) ↩

12. This claim could not be verified. ↩

13. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Émile Coué" (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Emile-Coue) ↩ ↩²

14. This claim could not be verified. ↩

15. According to Mike's original words: "In 1920 he wrote a book about suggestion, which was very popular in Europe but not popular in the United States." Upon verification, it should be: "Émile Coué's book on self-suggestion, Self-Mastery Through Conscious Autosuggestion, was published in Britain in 1920 and in the United States in 1922, and it was equally very popular in America—the American edition became a nonfiction bestseller for the Chicago Sunday Tribune in 1922, and Coué toured the United States in 1923 and 1924, sparking a nationwide 'Coué craze.'" (Source: Wikipedia, "Émile Coué," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cou%C3%A9) ↩

16. According to Mike's original words: "At the age of 18 she gave up organized religion." Upon verification, it should be: "Jane Roberts gave up her belief in God and the Catholic faith at the age of 19, after the death of her beloved grandfather." (Source: Wikipedia, "Jane Roberts," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Roberts) ↩

17. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Jonestown" (https://www.britannica.com/event/Jonestown) ↩

18. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Jonestown" (https://www.britannica.com/event/Jonestown) ↩

19. According to Mike's original words: "The World Health Organization announced earlier this month that smallpox had apparently been eradicated." Upon verification, it should be: "The World Health Organization declared the global eradication of smallpox on May 8, 1980, when the 33rd World Health Assembly adopted resolution WHA33.3, not in the most recent month." (Source: World Health Organization, "WHA33.3 — Declaration of global eradication of smallpox," https://www.who.int/publications/i/item/WHA33-3) ↩

20. Source: Wikipedia, "The Wealth of Nations" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Wealth_of_Nations) ↩ ↩²

21. Source: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "Keep Kids Safe" (2022) (https://archive.cdc.gov/www_cdc_gov/coronavirus/2019-ncov/covid-data/covidview/past-reports/01142022.html) ↩

22. Source: Gregory Shushan, "Afterlife Conceptions in the Vedas" (https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1749-8171.2011.00275.x) ↩

23. Source: University of International Business and Economics Library, "What the Diamond Sutra Says" (https://opac.lib.uibe.edu.cn/opac/book/897c6e15fea9be234c91ae3130d4b920) ↩

24. Source: Kumarajiva, trans., "Diamond Prajnaparamita Sutra" (https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hant/%E9%87%91%E5%89%9B%E8%88%AC%E8%8B%A5%E6%B3%A2%E7%BE%85%E8%9C%9C%E7%B6%93_(%E9%B3%A9%E6%91%A9%E7%BE%85%E4%BB%80)) ↩

25. Source: Foguang Dictionary Editorial Committee, "Foguang Dictionary: Koti" (https://www.fodian.cc/f05/72504.html) ↩

26. Source: Luo Mujun and Zhang Yongquan, "The Conjoining and Insights of Dunhuang Chinese Manuscripts of the Diamond Sutra" (https://ccj.pku.edu.cn/article/info?id=330800603) ↩

27. Source: Anhui Normal University Library, "Biography of Xuanzang" (https://lib1.ahnu.edu.cn/info/1009/9763.htm) ↩

28. Source: Wikipedia, "Huineng" (https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E6%83%A0%E8%83%BD) ↩

29. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Jonestown" (https://www.britannica.com/event/Jonestown) ↩

30. Source: U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "COVID Data Tracker" 2021 (https://stacks.cdc.gov/view/cdc/101705/cdc_101705_DS1.pdf) ↩

31. Source: World Health Organization, "COVID-19 situation updates for week 8 (21–27 February 2021)" 2021 (https://www.emro.who.int/pandemic-epidemic-diseases/covid-19/covid-19-situation-updates-for-week-8-2127-february-2021.html) ↩

32. Source: U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), "Backgrounder on the Three Mile Island Accident" (https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3mile-isle) ↩

33. Source: World Health Organization, "Mental Health Consequences of the Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima Nuclear Disasters: A Scoping Review" (included in U.S. National Institutes of Health PMC) (https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC8304648/) ↩

34. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Jonestown" (https://www.britannica.com/event/Jonestown) ↩

35. Source: Wikipedia, "The China Syndrome" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_China_Syndrome) ↩

36. This claim could not be verified. ↩

37. Source: Jane Roberts, "The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events" (https://archive.org/stream/PdfsSethMaterial/Jane-Roberts-A-Seth-Book-The-Individual-and-the-Nature-of-mass-events_djvu.txt) ↩

38. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Three Mile Island accident" (https://www.britannica.com/event/Three-Mile-Island-accident) ↩

39. According to Mike's original words: "On March 31, children and pregnant women within five miles of the plant were advised to evacuate." Upon verification, it should be: "The advisory evacuation occurred on March 30, 1979 (Friday), not March 31: Pennsylvania Governor Thornburgh, acting on the recommendation of the NRC chairman, advised pregnant women and preschool-age children within a five-mile radius of the Three Mile Island nuclear plant to evacuate." (Source: U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), "Backgrounder on the Three Mile Island Accident," https://www.nrc.gov/reading-rm/doc-collections/fact-sheets/3mile-isle) ↩

40. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Jonestown" (https://www.britannica.com/event/Jonestown) ↩

41. This claim could not be verified. ↩

42. This claim could not be verified. ↩

43. This claim could not be verified. ↩

44. Source: Peter Diamandis and Steven Kotler, "The Future Is Faster Than You Think" (2021) (https://book.douban.com/subject/35272152/) ↩

45. According to Mike's original words: "Frankenstein is a movie." Upon verification, it should be: "Frankenstein (Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus) was originally a Gothic science fiction novel published by British author Mary Shelley in 1818, and only later was adapted into films and other works." (Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus," https://www.britannica.com/topic/Frankenstein-or-The-Modern-Prometheus) ↩

46. This claim could not be verified. ↩

47. This claim could not be verified. ↩

48. Source: Jane Roberts, "The Unknown Reality, Volume One" (https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/601894/the-unknown-reality-volume-one-by-jane-roberts-notes-and-cover-art-by-robert-f-butts/) ↩

49. Source: Wikipedia, "Ten Precepts (Buddhism)" (https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/%E5%8D%81%E6%88%92_(%E4%BD%9B%E6%95%99)) ↩

50. Source: Wikipedia, "Upasampada" (https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/%E5%85%B7%E8%B6%B3%E6%88%92) ↩

51. Source: Wikipedia, "Upasampada" (https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/%E5%85%B7%E8%B6%B3%E6%88%92) ↩

52. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Cultural Revolution | Definition, Facts, & Failure" (https://www.britannica.com/event/Cultural-Revolution) ↩

53. This claim could not be verified. ↩

54. Source: Wikipedia, "Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homo_Deus:_A_Brief_History_of_Tomorrow) ↩

55. Source: Wikipedia, "Black Mirror" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror) ↩