Mike's commentary · The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, Chapter 8

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

Introduction

This chapter uses Nixon during the Watergate scandal as an example to illustrate how a repressed idealist, by distrusting impulses and exaggerating the gap between ideals and reality, becomes a fanatic. Seth discusses how impulses are inner motivating forces directed toward action, altruistic, and in line with the greatest good of both the individual and the world; from these arise probabilities and free will. Repressing impulses closes the doors of possible action and causes a loss of the sense of power. He also points out that Freudian and Darwinian negative beliefs make people afraid of impulses, and that one should trust natural impulses and meditate in action.

Key Points of This Chapter

• Impulses are the impetus toward action, arising from unconscious knowledge, altruistic and in line with the greatest good of the individual and the world.
• Distrusting and suppressing natural impulses closes the door to possible actions, causes a loss of the sense of power, and may turn an idealist into a fanatic.
• Nixon in the Watergate affair was a repressed idealist; he exaggerated the gap between the ideal and reality, regarded opponents as moral enemies, and used intelligence to rationalize his paranoia.
• Fanatics deny free will and justify the means by the end; the criteria for identifying them include being told that pleasure is wrong, that tolerance is weakness, that one must obey dogma, or that one must kill for peace.
• Freudian and Darwinian negative beliefs make people afraid of impulses; one should trust natural impulses, and true meditation is action.

Main Text

Chapter 8: People, Molecules, Power, and Free Will

We continue sharing Chapter 8 of The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, titled "People, Molecules, Power, and Free Will." This is Session 856, which began on Thursday, May 24, 1979, at 8:23 p.m.

This was not originally a routine class time. Rob wrote in his opening notes that yesterday's regular session did not take place, because as usual they sat waiting for the session to begin, but ended up watching television—the final episode of a miniseries adapted from the Watergate affair. While they were watching that drama, Jane told him that Seth had made a series of comments to her. Jane was watching TV, and Seth was there watching and commenting at the same time. Seth also gave Jane the title for Chapter 8, which was exactly the one just mentioned: "People, Molecules, Power, and Free Will."

They decided to move the session to this evening. However, after dinner tonight Jane did not want to hold the session, because she felt so free and relaxed. Yet before long, she declared with her usual assertiveness that she would hold the session after all, even earlier than the usual time. Jane said: "I don't know how long I can keep it up. I get great gobs of material from Seth on all kinds of subjects, and he describes some of it to me, but I have neither the time to write it down nor can I remember it." She laughed. She was very relaxed, yet began the session as easily as always. Rob said he had to write very fast to keep up with her delivery.

Seth dictated the next chapter: People, Molecules, Power, and Free Will.

The Watergate Affair and the Repressed Idealist

Before ending this particular part of the book—the part about frightened people, people who are afraid of themselves—Seth said he wanted to mention one more example, and that was the Watergate affair. Seth had discussed several specific social events in this part; besides Jonestown, there was also the Three Mile Island nuclear accident¹, and now he was going to talk about Watergate.

Last night Ruburt and Joseph watched a movie, a drama adapted from the Watergate affair. So a session that would ordinarily have been held did not take place. Ruburt was very interested in that television drama, and I was interested in Ruburt's and Joseph's reactions to him.

He said he was in some way watching it with them, but not in the manner of watching with eyes. He made himself primarily able to become aware of a certain kind of perception Ruburt had while watching television. He also mentioned a strange coincidence that was not a coincidence at all: another dramatic rendition of the same Watergate story was being broadcast at the same time on another channel, depicting the spiritual rebirth of one of President Nixon's best associates. But the two of them did not see that episode; Seth did.

Let us briefly look at the whole event, and keep in mind some earlier questions: When does an idealist turn into a fanatic? And how does that happen? How can the desire to do good turn into disastrous consequences? How does good turn into evil?

First, a brief introduction to the Watergate affair. Watergate took place in 1972². At that time, Nixon was running for reelection, and a secret organization under his campaign committee sent several people to the headquarters of his opponent—the Democratic Party's national headquarters—to install wiretaps, in order to eavesdrop on the specific content of the Democrats' meetings. Later they sent people a second time to secretly photograph the Democrats' meeting records or documents, and at the same time check whether the wiretaps installed the first time were working properly. As a result, the second time they went in they were caught, and all five men were arrested by the police. Upon investigation, it turned out they had been sent by Nixon's campaign operation, and Nixon found himself in this kind of trouble.

The matter itself was not complicated; what was complicated was Nixon's attitude toward it. He denied it at first, and after being exposed he argued his case vigorously, but in the end he resigned under the pressure of public opinion, without even finishing his term.

Nixon's hometown is Yorba Linda³, just below Los Angeles, and there is still a Nixon museum there now⁴. The environment in Yorba Linda is actually quite nice. That area is where the Republican bigwigs live in a cluster, and many famous Republican figures reside there. The Nixon family also built a library and a museum there.

Seth gave an analysis of Nixon as a person:

He was at heart a stern, rather traditionally religious, repressed idealist.

Nixon was a repressed idealist. He believed there was some idealized good. But at the same time, and this was also his worst flaw: he firmly believed that people were hopelessly flawed. Do not forget, he had a religious background, a traditional religious faith⁵. Christianity holds that people are flawed, that people have original sin. In addition, he also believed that people were filled with evil, and were naturally more inclined to do bad things than to have good intentions.

He believed in the absolute necessity of power, while at the same time being convinced that he did not possess it.

Nixon believed that power was necessary, that one absolutely had to have power, and that without power he could not realize what he called the idealized good. But he also felt that he himself did not have power. Think about it—he was the President of the United States, and he still thought he did not have power. Then who did?

Session 856

And furthermore, he believed that, in the most basic terms, the individual was powerless to change the rampant spread of evil and corruption that he saw in this country and in all other countries.

Even though he was the President of the United States, he still believed he did not have the power to change the corruption and evil he saw. No matter how much power he gained, he felt that others -- the Soviet Union, or other groups, other countries -- all had more power than he did. But he regarded their power as evil. You see how conflicted he was inside: he believed that idealized good existed, yet he also felt that bad people were very powerful, while good people were weak and lacking in vitality. He felt that bad people would stop at nothing to achieve their ends, so bad people were more powerful than good people.

He concentrated his attention upon the great gulf that seemed to separate the idealized good from what he saw as a swiftly expanding, actual, and ever-spreading corruption.

He focused his attention on this enormous gulf between the ideal and reality. He saw himself as righteous, and all those who disagreed with him were his moral enemies. He felt he was surrounded by corruption, and any means he could bring to bear to bring down those who threatened the presidency or the country could be justified. In order to strike down his enemies, he would stop at nothing.

Paranoia and the Misuse of Intelligence

He was as paranoid as any poor deluded man or woman who felt with no evidence that they were being pursued by space creatures, subterranean aliens, or evil psychic forces.

You see, don't we still have a batch of such people in our society today? People who believe we are controlled by alien beings, pursued by some kind of subterranean aliens or evil forces. Yes, this is still the case now. There is nothing magical about it; if you think it is magical, it is only because you yourself do not know, and you are making a fuss over something commonplace. This legend and tradition has been around for a very long time.

Those poor individuals will build up for themselves a logical sequence of events, in which the most innocuous contact becomes a most dire threat. They will project that fear outward until they seem to meet it in everyone they contact.

Those poor people string together their perceptions and the events they experience, and see everything as conforming to their ideas. For example, if he believes that alien beings control the Earth, then he looks at all kinds of news reports and feels that they are all evidence that alien beings control the Earth. In the end he believes these dark forces are everywhere, and that everyone around him is one of them.

To most other people, it is obvious that this paranoid view is not based on general facts, but on his own interpretation. But the President was not like that. The President had vast intelligence at his disposal. He was aware that there were many groups and organizations that disagreed with his policies, because the intelligence would tell him so.

He used that information in the same way that a paranoid might, in other circumstances, use the appearance of a police car to convince himself that he was being pursued by the police or the FBI or whatever.

The President used the enormous intelligence system to obtain vast amounts of information, but the way he used that information was the same as a paranoid who believes a police car is pursuing him. He sees a police car -- actually the police car is just on normal patrol -- and he feels that the police car is following him. So for him, that intelligence became a kind of evidence.

But for him, that intelligence became evidence -- and not just of a personal threat, but he felt that the good he represented in his heart was already in crisis.

He did not feel that his personal safety was threatened; that he could accept. What he could not accept was that the good he represented in his heart was already in crisis. Many people today also think this way: Trump can afford not to be president, but this justice cannot be erased. So this good has already been threatened.

Again, since the idealized good seemed so distant and so difficult to achieve, any means could be justified.

Because in their minds, this good is too distant and too difficult to achieve, and since the good is under threat, it must be protected at all costs. The cabinet members and those who followed him in various places all more or less shared the same characteristics.

There is no one more fanatical and more cruel than a self-righteous person.

Seth also said that such people very easily undergo a conversion to some kind of religion after the Watergate incident. Again, they considered themselves to be on the side of good, and turned to seek the power of communal relations, turning to the church rather than the government, listening to the voice of God in one way or another. It is the same now: after Trump could not be re-elected, his many followers made extensive use of religious language and religious methods to achieve a kind of psychological balance.

When Does an Idealist Become a Fanatic?

How can a well-intentioned idealist know whether his good intentions will achieve some realization? And how can he know whether that good intention might in fact lead to disastrous conditions? When does an idealist become a fanatic? Seth had already asked this question earlier, and he said let us look at it this way. He gave several criteria for judgment.

First:

If someone tells you that pleasure is wrong, and that tolerance is weakness, that you must fight and struggle, and that you must obey this or that dogma, if you are told that this is the one and only correct path to the idealized good, then you are most likely dealing with a fanatic.

You need to wake up and check whether you are dealing with a fanatic, and whether it matches the above characteristics.

If you are taught that the end justifies any means.

If you are taught that as long as the goal is lofty enough, all kinds of means can be justified -- even assassination, bombing, murder and arson are all acceptable, because as long as your goal is righteous -- then you are dealing with a fanatic.

If you are told that you may kill for the sake of peace, then you are dealing with someone who does not understand peace or justice.

If you are told to give up your free will, then you are dealing with a fanatic.

Seth gave some examples to help you judge whether you have joined a fanatical organization, or whether you are dealing with a fanatic.

Probabilities and Free Will

Both people and molecules dwell in the realm of probabilities, and their paths are not determined.

The fate of human beings and the fate of molecules are not determined; they are not fixed. All probabilities are open, all exist. Seth talked about probabilities right at the beginning of The "Unknown" Reality. We have many, many kinds of probabilities, and molecules also have many kinds of probabilities.

This is a fundamental expression of free will. You have absolute free will, and the vast reality of probabilities makes the existence of free will possible. Because there are too many probabilities -- if there are trillions of probabilities, doesn't that mean you have infinite possibilities? If you have infinite possibilities, doesn't that mean you have all free will? When the probabilities are vast enough, you have free will.

If you were not aware to some degree of probable actions and events, then not only could you not choose between them, but of course you would not have any feeling of choice, and you would not be aware of the entire issue.

What does this mean? There are two levels. The first level: you cannot choose between them, because you simply do not know that this probability exists. The second level: you do not feel at all that you might have a choice, or that you have the ability to choose. The first is feeling that there is a choice but you yourself cannot choose; the second is feeling that you have no ability or possibility of choosing at all. In that case, you also cannot perceive what the essence of the whole issue is.

Through your conscious choices in daily life, you affect all the worlds of your world. The mass world, therefore, is the result of the individual choices of all kinds of people in the collective world.

Our collective world, the public world, is the final result of the individual choices of all kinds of different people.

Impulses and Action

If you had no impulse to do this or that, you could not make choices at all. Choices, therefore, usually involve making decisions among a great variety of impulses.

The driving force behind your choices is your impulses. You have impulses, and only then do you make choices and take action. Impulses may lead you to do this, or they may lead you to do that, so you are always making decisions among all kinds of impulses.

Impulses are toward action.

Impulses will inevitably bring about some kind of action. Impulses are a driving force toward action; without this driving force, you would have no action.

Some of these impulses are conscious, and some are not.

Some impulses you can be aware of, and some you are not aware of at all -- you just go and do it.

Every cell of your body feels an impulse toward action, response, and communication.

Every one of your cells has impulses. What impulses? Impulses toward action, impulses toward response, and impulses toward communication. So every cell has these three kinds of impulses. Isn't this very similar to human beings? Human beings are born with the impulsiveness toward action, toward response, and toward communication.

You have been taught not to trust your impulses.

From childhood we are told not to trust impulses; impulses are the devil. But impulses help you develop events with natural power. Only impulses can propel these events with natural power.

In the child, impulses teach it to develop muscle and mind in its own unique way.

Children develop physical growth and mental growth precisely through impulses.

As you will see, such personal or private impulses are nevertheless based upon the larger condition of humanity and the earth.

What you see are all small personal impulses, small wishes, small desires, but these impulses and wishes are actually based upon the larger condition of humanity and the earth. They conform to the needs of this larger environment and framework. Your small impulses all serve the needs of this larger framework.

So, ideally speaking, the fulfillment of each individual would automatically lead to a better humanity.

So it is said that each person only needs to satisfy their own small impulses, satisfy their own small happiness -- not those great impulses to benefit humanity, but small impulses: today you want to eat this, tomorrow you want to make that, the day after you want to do this -- those very small, natural impulses of daily life. As long as you satisfy them and fulfill them, this personal fulfillment of yours will automatically lead to a better humanity.

Jane's Delivery: Trust Your Natural Impulses

Session 856 ended at 9:19. Rob said that while he sat writing the notes for this session, Jane left the room. When Jane came back, she said she had something to tell him. She said:

I think this began with Seth, but then I went into an altered state of my own consciousness.

It was initiated by Seth, but she entered an altered state of her own consciousness. The following words were written in a state like that of a previous session where Seth's consciousness was below and Jane's consciousness was above -- just like the time she received dream material at the dinner table. At 9:47, Rob began to write. The following is what Jane said, speaking on behalf of Seth:

When you learn to trust your natural impulses, they introduce you to a sense of personal power, and make you realize that your own actions do have meaning. You do affect events, and you can see definite signs that you are achieving good results. The idealized goal is then no longer seen as distant, so it is expressed, and even that kind of stage-by-stage expression can be regarded as an achievement. Previously we did not trust our own impulses, so that they often appeared in very distorted ways.

This passage is very important. To put it simply: when you follow every natural small impulse within you, you are taking one step further toward that ideal goal of yours. Everyone has an ideal goal, but if that goal is too distant, you must believe that everything you are doing now, or everything your impulses lead you to do, is moving toward that goal. Although sometimes it does not look like it, or it is not at all, or it may even be in the opposite direction -- at such times you must trust yourself, trust the instructions your impulses give you, and do it firmly. After you do it, you will feel a kind of joy, a kind of happiness. And then you should take this staged result, this satisfaction of a small impulse, as a small achievement, a kind of staged achievement. You should create a form for yourself, in words or in some other form, a symbolic affirmation, affirming this small step of yours, affirming that this small impulse of yours has been realized by yourself. Through such a small action, when your small impulses are realized every day, you are steadily advancing toward your ideal.

This passage is not difficult; if you do not understand it, you can read it twice more and you will understand. But as for doing it, I do not know to what extent everyone can manage. Try your best to do it, try your best to satisfy your impulses, and do not think about whether they are good or bad, or what consequences they may bring.

Jane said that was all she got. But the general meaning was:

Each person should try as best they can, through their daily life -- work, social structures -- to actualize the idealized good. And at the same time, they also use certain yardsticks to help themselves judge whether their actions are truly consistent with their ideals.

These yardsticks are actually the ones given in this chapter, the criteria for judgment mentioned earlier. How do you judge whether you are dealing with a fanatical idealist or a pragmatic idealist? If you are dealing with a fanatic, then stop immediately; if you are dealing with a pragmatic idealist, then you may continue. The judgment in between is actually very simple; he has already given many examples of fanatics earlier, and I hope you can all remember them.

To put it simply, the way to realize your great ideal is right beside you; start with the things around you. If someone tells you that you must join some organization, that you must give up your personal things, that the individual is powerless, that only the organization can accomplish anything, and so on -- you must be careful about all of this. You must see whether this organization can realize your greatest personal value, whether it respects your individuality, whether it respects your personal rights, whether it is depriving you of your free will or giving you the greatest free will.

The True Root of the Pollution Problem

Jane also mentioned that today they received a letter from a reader about pollution. Seth also wanted to say something about that through her.

The real problem is not the pollution of the earth, or the problem of nuclear waste, but the beliefs that give rise to such problems.

Seth's meaning is this: the problem of environmental pollution and the problem of nuclear waste are not in themselves the fundamental problem. The matter itself is not important; what is important is, what makes you see this problem? What makes you produce this problem? What makes you feel that this problem is so important?

Why do you feel that the environmental problem is so urgent? Why do you feel that the nuclear waste problem is so serious? Are you presupposing a very idealized good -- an Earth without environmental pollution and without nuclear waste? But now it cannot be realized, because there is no kind of industrial production or industrial product that does not pollute the Earth. If we enjoy clean energy, there is the possibility of nuclear pollution. The key to the problem is not whether there is nuclear pollution, but whether you are full of pessimism and fear about the future of society -- do you believe that the world is getting better and better, or worse and worse?

This is what Seth means. He says, do not be superstitious about these environmentalists, these so-called green organizations, who exaggerate environmental problems to a certain degree, and then make people all over the world panic, nervously worrying about future global warming, melting glaciers, rising sea levels, species extinction, nuclear war breaking out, nuclear power plant leaks. Is it these problems themselves? No, it is the people who publicize these problems everywhere. The harm caused by these people is far greater than the harm those things would cause to humanity if they really happened.

There is also another attitude:

And the belief that an idealized good is worth such risks.

That is to say, we want a kind of good, and since we want this result, we must pay the price. Human development must have such a price. This is a kind of scientific fanaticism. Both of these attitudes are wrong.

People are not polluting the world merely out of greed, but for the benefit of all, only often the means they choose cannot justify those ends.

From the second perspective, the purposes of these people are not bad either; they are also good -- building nuclear power plants is also for the common benefit of humanity, for generating electricity, for saving energy, for clean energy. But the possible nuclear pollution, nuclear leaks, or the cost of human life for this purpose -- cannot be said to be a reasonable price that should be accepted. If you think about the problem this way, you are also wrong. No matter when, you cannot allow the rationality of the goal to justify the means. This issue was already specifically discussed in the previous session.

Note: The Watergate Affair from Beginning to End

In the early morning of June 17, 1972⁶, five men were arrested inside the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate apartment complex (a mixed building of hotel and offices) in Washington. These men had been hired by a secret group working for the Committee to Re-elect the President, for Republican President Richard Nixon. Their task was to photograph documents and check the wiretaps they had installed in the office during their first illegal entry in May. The detection of the Watergate break-in exposed and led to a series of labyrinthine events, finally ending with President Nixon's resignation on August 9, 1974⁷.

Alright, that is all for the interpretation and sharing of this session.

Impulses as the Inner Driving Force

This session is very important. It talks about the principles by which we live and some basic principles of life.

First, Seth begins by saying—

Session 857

Impulses provide the impetus toward action, and they also drive the physical and spiritual person to make use of physical and spiritual power.

The meaning of this sentence has two levels. Impulses are the impetus toward action, and this action is a force of action on two fronts: one is the action force of your body; the other is the action force of the spiritual you -- that is, the spiritual part of you. Impulses provide the driving force behind both of these.

Let me say it again: impulses are the driving force of your action. First, they enable your body to act; second, they enable your spirit or spirituality to act. Both of these driving forces are impulses.

Impulses provide the effective force by which the individual influences the world, and they work within the world.

That is to say, they work on both this physical world and the inner spiritual world -- one on the outer physical level, and one on the inner spiritual level.

Impulses also open up choices that you may not have been aware of before. Impulses bring action, and action brings new action, and this subsequent action is often something you did not anticipate. This unanticipated action then opens up possibilities and choices you had not expected. So impulses can sometimes bring unexpected results.

Seth says --

I have often said that cells are precognitive, and that at that level the body is aware of far more data than your conscious mind knows and understands.

Before you do anything, the cells of your body already know that vast data. That is something your conscious mind does not know, but your cells can know.

He says --

The universe and everything within it is composed of data, and this data is aware energy.

Again, in the most difficult way to explain, the data concerning the entire universe is forever latent within each of its parts.

How should we understand this? Let me put it in my own words, because his language is indeed not easy to understand. What he means is this: that inner impulse of yours comes from the vast data obtained by your cells. This vast data includes not only that of your body, but also that of your surrounding environment, the people around you, and even the data of the entire country, the entire earth, the entire universe -- all of it is stored within this tiny cell. And your cells can foresee from a very high level which actions are best for you, and also best for the world you live in. They select the best course of action from among all possibilities, and then remind you of it in the very obvious form of an impulse.

So do not think that impulses are without origin, that they are disordered, that they are like what Freud said -- a kind of chaotic, disordered, dark, shadowy thought buried beneath the subconscious⁸. No. All of your impulses are the best possible result, and you just need to act on them. Trust your impulses, and that is all.

As for how your impulses calculate this, how they balance all these things for you -- I do not know, and you do not know either. If you do not know, then you do not know. If you say, I must know; if you will not let me know, then I will not proceed, I will not believe it -- well, I am sorry, but if you insist on that idea, then you can only live in this century; you should not live in the 21st century.

Why do I say this? If you understand the operating principle of quantum computers, you will understand. When a quantum computer operates, it is not calculating. Our current computers calculate -- operations of 0 and 1. The final process of quantum computing goes through a quantum circuit, and it is an evolutionary process -- you give it a known thing, and it evolves a result. As for how it evolves, scientists will never know. This is the fact, and it remains so to this day. You say, I want to see; you must let me see how this quantum is calculating -- well, the moment you look at it, it crashes, it freezes, and it cannot compute. It is just like wave-particle duality, the most famous double-slit experiment in quantum mechanics⁹ --

When you are not looking at it, it is clearly in wave form; but if you insist on believing that a single photon cannot pass through two slits at the same time, that according to our human material understanding, how could it pass through two slits at once? How could it go through twice? Because your belief is so powerful, so rigid, and so stubborn -- fine, the photon will show you the particle state. You want to see, right? You firmly believe that my photon is particle-like, you firmly believe that a thing cannot be here and there at the same time -- then I will give you the result you firmly believe in. So the double-slit experiment is very easy to explain using Seth's theory. When you think that a photon has consciousness, when you consider that there is consciousness within that tiny photon, what would it think? It can only do this.

So speaking of this principle, the final process of quantum computing -- you do not know how it computes. It does not compute either; it is an evolution, and the result appears in a flash. So when you can understand this, you can somewhat understand that part of your subconscious or your inner self, whose method of computation cannot be made known to you. It is not that it does not want you to know, nor is it deliberately hiding it from you, but rather it is a method that our current human intelligence cannot comprehend. So you have no need to know it either; you just need to know its result.

Just imagine that you have a super quantum computer within you. You give it the situation you are currently in, the present environment, and it will give you an optimal solution. In what form does it give you that solution? It gives it to you in the form of your impulses.

Momentum and Tension

He rambled on for quite a while, but what he wanted to say is this: every cell of yours participates in the computation, formed through these materials of the universe, and the universe is holographic—every point contains all the information.

Then he said—

The force of the universe, and of every particle, wave, or human motivation within it, is toward the magnificent drive of creative possibility, and the vibrant tension that exists between probable choices and probable events.

This passage is deeply meaningful, and it contains a very profound principle. Let us analyze it carefully.

"The universe, and every particle within it"—remember, these are two levels: the entire universe, and every unit within this universe—the smallest particle, the smallest energy wave, or a person's motivation. These are all parts of the universe. He says that whether it is the universe, or every tiny individual within the universe, the drive toward creative possibility, the force of that motivation, is this magnificent drive.

Let me put it in my own words, because his words are really hard to understand. The motivation behind every person's desire to do things, that impulse, that force, the force of the motivation that pushes you to act—and the force of this universe, and the force of every particle and every energy wave in the universe—the drive behind them is the same kind of force.

What kind of force is it? It is a magnificent drive toward creative possibility. The purpose of this force is one thing only: to create the greatest possibility. Seth used the adjective "magnificent"—he felt that this force was not described well enough, not beautiful enough, not good enough, so he added "magnificent." The drive behind human action, that motivation, and the universe's drive to create all things, to create all possibilities, and a tiny molecule or atom's drive to create, from its own standpoint, infinite possibilities—that drive is essentially one drive, all the same. It is the drive to create possibility, the drive to seek the greatest possible creation of oneself. Humans have the drive to seek their own greatest possibility, and molecules, atoms, and the universe all have exactly the same drive.

Do you understand? Then he continued, saying that besides this drive, there is also a tension. Why is this passage important? He mentioned two things: first the drive, second the tension.

What tension? You must listen carefully to this part—it is very important—

and the vibrant tension that exists between probable choices and probable events.

What does this mean? Do you not have this drive behind you, pushing you to do certain things? This impulse is urging you from behind. And what you face is a choice of possibilities: you can choose this, or you can choose that; you can marry Zhang San, or you can marry Li Si; you can join the army, or you can go to college—all are possible. The choice behind this is entirely yours. But no matter which choice you make, does it not imply a series of events that it will trigger?

One choice corresponds to one kind of probable event. If there are ten thousand probable choices, there are ten thousand probable events.

Now here is the question: at your present position, between your probable choices and probable events, there is a state where something is about to happen but has not yet happened, and whether it happens or not depends entirely on a single thought of yours. This possibility is about to be actualized but has not yet been actualized, and whether it is actualized is up to you. And to some degree, all these possibilities have also been actualized, but for you, you still think of them as merely possibilities, not yet actualized. In such a state, Seth describes it as a tension.

To put it simply: we choose one possibility among possibilities, and then we expect this possibility to produce an event. Between the event that occurs and the possibility we chose, there is an expectation, or a drive to make it happen, or a longing, an anticipation—this thing is called tension. And this tension, together with the drive mentioned earlier, jointly propels you to complete this event.

There is also a second kind of tension. It is that between your possibility and the probable event, there is always an infinitely large relationship. You want to experience something, and the result of that experience is infinitely vast. When you make a decision, this decision will produce subsequent probable events, and the probable events will produce a series of further probable events, and this chain reaction will bring you infinitely many experiences. You originally expected a one, but it gave you ten thousand. Just like you only expected to marry the woman you love, the woman of your heart—you never expected it would bring quarrels and fights, a mess of trivialities, firewood, rice, oil, and salt. None of these things were what you expected; you only made one choice—to marry the pretty girl you liked. You did not choose all those trivial matters that came after, yet those messy trivial matters are also the events that follow from the probability of this choice.

Can you understand this? I can only explain it in words to this point, because it is not easy to articulate. So between your probable choice and the probable event, they are not entirely consistent. When you want to create something, and the thing created does not turn out as you wished, when there may be some deviation and error, this deviation and error is the tension. And when you want to correct this deviation and error, you will take new actions and new methods, and this new action is a new choice, which will bring new probable events, which will bring new errors and new deviations.

So if you understand these two examples, you can roughly understand how our lives and the entire universe operate. The driving force behind its operation is roughly this meaning. I can only say roughly—I cannot say it is a physical rule, or some theory, or some principle. It is just such a rule, and you can only understand it roughly this way. I can only explain it to this point according to my own understanding. If you have a better understanding, please leave a comment and let me know.

He said—

This applies to people as well as to molecules, and to those smaller parts or units that scientists like to hypothesize to their own amazement.

The two principles above—one, that the greatest creative motivation behind the entire universe is the same as human motivation and the same as molecular motivation; and two, that the tension between the possibilities triggered by this motivation and the probable events—applies to us humans and to molecules, as well as to those smallest parts and units that scientists infer and hypothesize through their own brains, atoms and molecules and so on, all apply. So Seth, without even trying, once again revealed the operating principle behind a very great matter.

Let Impulses Work for You

Then he said—

In more mundane terms, impulses often come from a knowledge in the unconscious.

We ordinarily think that impulses come from a part of ourselves we do not know, so we call it unconscious knowledge. This knowledge is received automatically and spontaneously by the energy that composes your body, and then it is processed. The impulse is automatically received by you, and you automatically act on it and process it. Of course, you can also ignore this impulse, and you can also suppress this impulse, but you did receive it. Therefore, information directly relevant to you can be put to use by you. It has already been converted into a result, reminding your body in the form of an impulse. So your body should go ahead and use this thing, because it is useful and beneficial to you.

Ideally—if things are ideal, if this person lives without inner conflict, if this person's energy flows freely, if there is no blockage of energy—

Your impulses are always reactions in line with your own greatest benefit.

If you do not add artificial interference, do not add the judgments of the small ego, if you simply follow the purest impulse of that kind of energy, then the impulse itself is the most beneficial to you, and it accords with your greatest benefit. You do not know—do you not know why this is so?

So we often say, follow the greatest impulse within your heart, follow the form of the heart's impulse. Many people do not understand and say, how can that be? If I follow my impulses, I should go rob a bank; if I follow my impulses, I should go bully and oppress others. All right, we will not discuss this question any further; it has already been said many times. Conversely, suppose the greatest impulse in your heart really is to bully and oppress others, really is to rob a bank, really is to kill and set fires—then go do it, because for your present moment that is the most beneficial. As for why, you do not know and I do not know either; just go do it. But if that is not your greatest impulse, if it is only something you say with your mouth, or something you yourself speculate your impulse might lead you to do—those bad things—then sorry, that is not your impulse. That is your own speculation and guesswork about your impulse, or it is your own stigmatization of your impulse.

Do not insult your own impulses. What you live by is precisely this impulse. When you stick those stigmatizing labels on it, you only make yourself live in fear. You live in a kind of discovery—that in an environment without control, without organization, without laws, without rules, you would reveal the ugliest, most brutal, most disgusting side of human nature—if that is how you think of yourself, then you can only live in a controlled society, in a controlled organization, and you will forever be managed by others, forever living like livestock. Because you do not believe you are a human being. You think that when you are given human freedom, you will kill and set fires, burn, kill, and plunder—then you can only be managed, and there is no way around it. If you do not even believe in yourself, then who can manage you?

I will say it again, because many people ask this question—they always feel that when you say to follow the impulse of the highest joy in your heart, it makes sense, but they dare not do it; it will not work. The impulses in my heart are terrifying; I cannot tell you, I cannot even say them out loud, and even less can I act on them. Many people think this way. No matter how well you put it, it is useless; I will not do it. So here Seth, afraid that you might misunderstand, once again breaks it open and explains it to you in detail: your impulses are the most beneficial to you. The premise is that, ideally speaking, you should not be limited by yourself.

And also—

And also reactions in line with the greatest benefit of your world.

Now this is really something, is it not? It is not only best for you; it also takes into account the benefit and needs of the whole world. That is to say, when you pursue the impulse in your heart, it is not only the best response for you, but also the best response for the whole world. Just go do it, that is all. You insist on using that limited brain of yours, with just that little bit of knowledge, that little bit of wisdom, crackling away, insisting on calculating, "My brain is strong, I should not do it this way, impulse is the devil"—if you insist on acting according to your brain, then go ahead and act. You have a quantum computer and you refuse to use it; you insist on fiddling with an abacus—then there is no way around it. You do not understand its principles, so you do not trust it. But when you use your phone, do you know the principles of your phone? When you use a computer, do you know the principles of a computer? You do not know them either, and yet you still use them perfectly well, do you not? You use the body you were born with so well—do you know the principles of your body? You do not know, and yet you still use it perfectly well, do you not?

So you should understand: do not learn from those argumentative nitpickers who insist on splitting hairs.

Reason and Spontaneity Are Intimate Companions

Seth says —

In the contemporary world, however, there is a deep and harmful distrust of impulse.

The contemporary world has this problem — it does not trust human impulse. And in your terms, as far as the history you yourselves know is concerned, it has always been this way. Not just in your contemporary era — ever since humanity has had history, ever since there have been records, human beings have never trusted their own impulses. Seth puts this very bluntly — it is not just that the contemporary era really has this problem; ancient times were the same.

Impulse is spontaneous, and you are taught not to trust the spontaneous part of your existence, but instead to rely on your reason and intellect.

By the way, Seth says this in a very amusing tone —

The reason and intellect that you think you have, their operation is also quite spontaneous.

What he means is: impulse is spontaneous, I admit that is absolutely true, but just because it is spontaneous, you do not trust it? You trust your reason and logic, your intellect and wise judgment? But your reason and knowledge, your wisdom — these are also spontaneous. Why can they be trusted, while impulse, being spontaneous, cannot be trusted? Why do you favor one over the other? Think carefully about those thoughts of yours, those so-called rational things, those things of consciousness — can you control them?

Then Seth says —

When you do not interfere with yourself, you are spontaneously reasonable.

You must remember this sentence. When you do not interfere with yourself, when you do not let your little brain run wild with random thoughts, when you do not keep frantically clicking the beads of the abacus in your head, when you hand over your entire decision to the most powerful, most reinforced quantum computer within your body — that is when you are not interfering with yourself. But every day, every one of us has that abacus in our head clicking away nonstop.

And because of your beliefs, reason and spontaneity seem not to be intimate companions.

Because you hold such beliefs, you always feel that reason is not spontaneous, that reason is the result of logical thinking, so you feel that reason and spontaneity do not seem to be intimate partners. But of course they are intimate partners — reason is also spontaneous; it is just that you do not think it is.

Impulses Are Altruistic

Seth says:

Psychologically, your impulses are as vital to your existence as your physical body and organs are.

He emphasizes again that psychologically, impulses are as important to you as your living physical body is to you. In other words, if you had no impulses, your psyche would already be dead, and you would already be a person without a soul. Remember what I am saying: when you have no impulses, you are already dead.

Then he also says:

They are as altruistic and unselfish as your physical organs are.

Once again, Seth says with fervor: your physical organs are likewise altruistic and unselfish. What does it mean to be altruistic and unselfish? It means that within your physical body itself, among the various organs and among the cells, there is mutual cooperation and coordination. It is altruistic, not selfish.

Yet from childhood we are taught that human beings are born selfish. Even if our thoughts are not selfish, our physical bodies are selfish, because they must seize matter and occupy resources in order to feed themselves and maintain the survival of the body, so they must be selfish. These are all things that the movies, television shows, and novels you watch have taught you.

I remember one documentary that was extremely well made. The first story told of a fishing boat that lost power at sea; the boat was also failing and taking on water, and the people were forced to flee onto a lifeboat. It seemed that on the boat they began killing each other; out of dozens of crew members, more than half died in the end — they killed each other and ate each other's bodies, killing the weaker ones first and dividing them up to eat, then after a couple of days killing another one. The people on this boat were eventually rescued, but they had all eaten the corpses of their companions. This story was turned into films, television dramas, and many novels, loudly proclaiming that human nature itself is selfish, and that under such conditions it is inevitably the law of the jungle. Our history, literature, and novels tell us that this is the truth — that as long as this situation arises, people will inevitably eat each other, and people are inevitably selfish. We have believed this since childhood.

And what are the facts? Not that at all. Because another example provides completely opposite evidence. On a small island nation in the Pacific — I cannot remember exactly which one, it seems it was a very small island nation under New Zealand or Australia — those boys had lived there for generations. One day, four boys — around eleven or twelve, thirteen or fourteen years old, the youngest eight or nine, ten, and the oldest only thirteen or fourteen — secretly took a boat out because they wanted to go play. That boat was for inshore fishing and was not at all suited for the open ocean, but they took it out anyway, and then they went missing. The government, Australia, and New Zealand all devoted enormous resources to searching for them, but they were never found. These four boys, with no water, no food, nothing at all, drifted at sea for more than half a year, about one hundred and fifty-some days¹⁰, until one day they were rescued by an Australian on a boat. How did they survive? These four boys cooperated with one another; even the weakest one they kept helping all along, and even at their most desperate moments, they never thought of killing anyone or eating anyone. Four boys survived under conditions in which survival should have been impossible.

So what is human nature, really? Is human nature fundamentally good or evil? Do not listen to what film and television productions or the news say. If every day all you watch is that, and your mind is filled with that, then I am sorry, but if you really found yourself in such a situation, it is very possible that you might reveal your most brutal side. But the true self — those boys had not received much education and had not been subjected to much influence; they were in the purest, most essential state of human nature. This story is very famous and was later made into a documentary; those boys later also went to work with that Australian, fishing at sea all along, living and working normally.

I will emphasize it once more: your impulses are, to you, just like your physical organs — altruistic and unselfish. Do not immediately think of impulses as selfish; that is the influence of beliefs you have received, things other people told you. What other people told you, you have not verified or experienced yourself; you were simply taught it by others, and so you think it is true.

I hope you will read this sentence several times — this is what Seth says. The reason I told you this story is also to reinforce this belief in you. If you previously held the opposite belief, then change it starting today: your impulses are altruistic and unselfish; your physical body, your body, is also altruistic and unselfish. This is the truth.

Following Impulses, Feeling the Shape of Your Life

But every impulse, to the person who feels it, is direct and tailor-made for that person.

Every impulse is aimed at the person who can feel that impulse, already tailored to fit them. It is not a uniform impulse, but an optimal solution specific to the individual.

Ideally, by following your impulses, you would feel the shape of your life's impulses.

Seth uses this word extremely well. Your perception of the shape of your life can be felt by feeling your impulses and following your impulses. Your life has a shape; life has a posture. What kind of posture you have is exactly the state of your impulses.

Just like something Rob once said -- and Seth also thought Rob said it very well, so he quoted it. Rob once said something similar in a poem or a novel --

You will not spend time guessing what your purpose is, because when you become aware of the direction your natural impulses lead to, and feel yourself exercising power in the world through such action, your purpose will show itself to you.

What he means is, do not go guessing what the purpose of your action is. You only need to feel that your action is propelled by the power of the natural impulses behind it, and feel that you are exercising your personal power in this world, in this universe, through the power of such action -- then your purpose will reveal itself to you.

Do not keep asking what consequences an impulse will bring, what results it will produce -- do not worry about it. Act on the impulse first, and the results will tell you themselves.

Let me say it again: impulses are directed toward action, impulses are directed toward fulfillment, impulses are a form of the natural power of body and mind. Impulses are a pathway through which your personal expression intersects with the material world and influences the material world. What can represent your truest expression? It is impulse. Impulse is your truest expression, the most natural expression of exercising your own power in this natural world, and also the most basic pathway through which your own thoughts, ideas, and intentions collide with this natural world in this material universe. The action brought by impulse is an intersection between you and this material world. If you do not know what you should be guided by, then today you should understand: you should be guided by impulse.

Fanatics and the Closed Mental Environment

He says—

Many cults of one kind or another, and many fanatics, seek to divide you from your natural impulses.

Many cults are like this. They do not like to let you act on impulse; they do not want you to express yourself. They want you to follow the norms of their organization; they want to break down your belief in your spontaneous existence. Not only do they forbid you to express yourself impulsively, they also break down your belief in your spontaneous existence, making you feel very small, like a tiny cog, fit only to play an insignificant role within this large organization. Therefore, the great power of impulse becomes blocked, and you cannot put it to use. The pathways of probability are closed off bit by bit, because without the push of impulse to make the probable choices you should be making, your probabilities disappear. Until you really end up living in a closed mental environment—if you follow the warnings they give you, you live in a mental prison.

In which you seem to be powerless, as if you cannot affect the world as you wish, as if your ideals must necessarily always be stillborn.

Some of this was discussed earlier in this book. For example, in the tragic situation at Jonestown¹¹, all the doors leading to possibly effective action seemed to be shut. There were actually many kinds of possibilities there; people did not have to die. But in that environment, in such a mental prison, everyone felt there was no other way out but suicide.

These followers and their families were taught to act against their natural impulses, to do things strictly according to the organization's ways. They were taught not to trust the outside world; the world outside their organization was not to be trusted. And gradually, the gap between misguided idealism and an exaggerated version of the world's evil blocked all the doors through which power could be exercised. Because the gap was too great—real society was too dangerous, their ideals too distant—in that situation, death was the only road left, and suicide became the final and only choice.

To those who are frightened, the desire for suicide remains the last resort.

Those people's natural impulses toward action had already been blocked. On the one hand they were intensified, yet on the other hand they were denied any actual expression. These people's impulses were blocked, dammed up there. The more they were blocked, the stronger they became, just like Yu the Great controlling the floods. The more you prevent someone from expressing impulse, the stronger that impulse becomes; and when the impulse is strong, you still deny it actual expression. What does it become in the end?

Seth says that in both humans and animals, there is a natural impulse toward death. You may say, how is that possible? But it exists. This impulse is very, very weak, almost imperceptible to you. But look at those animals and people who commit suicide—if there were no such impulse toward death, how could they commit suicide? It is just that in some people it is very weak, and you can hardly feel it. But in such circumstances, because all other impulses are suppressed—this won't do, that won't do, there is no road anywhere—the impulse toward death, originally very faint, becomes the only impulse left that can still be expressed when other impulses cannot be exercised, because the pent-up energy has nowhere else to go. That is the desire to die.

There are many misconceptions about the nature of impulses, and we will therefore discuss them quite thoroughly.

Seth says that because impulse is so important, he must explain it thoroughly. If he does not explain it thoroughly, you cannot understand why you should follow your own impulses.

I always want to emphasize the importance of individual action, for only individuals can help form organizations that become effective tools for the actual expression of ideals.

Only impulse can bring about individual action, and individual action is very important. Why is it important? Because only individuals can form organizations. And when each person within an organization can exercise their own impulses and realize their personal value, then the organization can become a very effective tool for realizing their ideals. Actually, everyone is an idealist; everyone has this. But if this idealist is not used well, they will turn into a fanatic—either becoming a follower or becoming a fanatical leader.

Only those who trust their spontaneous existence and the altruistic nature of their impulses can have the conscious wisdom to choose the most beneficial events from countless probable futures.

Because once again, impulse not only takes the individual's greatest benefit into consideration, but also considers all other beings—not only people, but also the world and other living creatures.

Are you such a person? Do you believe in your spontaneous existence, and that this spontaneous existence itself is altruistic in nature? Only with such wisdom can you choose the most beneficial events from countless probable futures. How do you choose? By following your inner impulses.

I use the term "impulse" for the benefit of the general public.

Seth says, I use the word "impulse" so that you can understand it more easily; if I used another word, you would not know what it meant. And in those terms, molecules and protons also have their impulses. If you can understand what impulse means for humans, then molecules and protons also have their impulses—but their impulses are not the same as human impulses. For protons and atoms, their consciousness is simply a response to stimuli, without the impulses and consciousness that humans have. Of course we cannot apply human understanding and say that atoms and molecules can smile—no. But they all have their own impulses toward growth and value fulfillment, and impulses to explore all possibilities.

You Kill Your Own Impulses the Way You Spray Mosquitoes with Insecticide

He said—

To many of you, it may seem that impulses are unpredictable, contradictory, without reason, the result of a capricious mixture of body chemicals.

You think impulses are all this, and so you feel they must be crushed, because you feel they cannot be trusted. You set out to eliminate them with the same deadly intent with which you spray mosquitoes with insecticide—you go to eliminate your impulses, just as we use Raid spray to kill mosquitoes.

Then he went on to say, often the insecticide kills more than just the mosquitoes; it kills other microorganisms and other living things as well, and the effects can be very long-lasting, harmful to our human earthly environment, and possibly catastrophic in consequence. But to regard impulses as chaotic, meaningless, or as detrimental to an orderly life does indeed represent a very dangerous attitude, one that leads to many of your problems and often distorts the very nature of impulses. This in itself is an attitude with catastrophic consequences. Many, many of the problems in our lives are caused by this.

Each person burns with such a desire to act, and to perform beneficial, altruistic actions, eagerly, to truly leave a stamp upon the world.

We want to leave something behind in this world. We are born as humans and walk through this life, and we want to leave something of value to humanity, to this universe, to this world. This is the most primal desire in every person.

The spiritual university we are now doing, following the teal organization model—are we not doing exactly the same thing? We are igniting in every person that fervent longing, that desire within their hearts. Why has the teal organization drawn such a response from so many people? Why is our group growing faster than the rate at which one would normally expect to see it grow? Why is it bursting forth and developing so rapidly, displaying boundless vitality? The reason Seth has already stated: every person has this desire, this burning desire—to act, to do things that benefit others. This is an instinctive action.

So when a person acts instinctively, is it good, or kind, or evil? Do you still want to believe what the media and literary novels have fed you? When you see things that do not conform to your values and beliefs, just do not let them influence you, that is all.

He said—

When this natural impulse toward action is constantly denied over a period of time, when it is not trusted, when a person feels at war with his own impulses and shuts all the doors toward possible action, then that intensity will explode through whatever escape hatch remains open.

When you shut down and block off these natural impulses, the accumulated energy will explode through the only door still left open. Whatever door it is, even if it is a door of wanting to die, it will put all the energy there. The example of Jonestown mentioned above illustrates exactly this point.

He said—

I am not speaking of anything like repression.

I am not talking about the kind of repression ordinary psychologists speak of. If this inner impulse is suppressed over a long period, it is not as simple as repression. He said—

I am indeed speaking of a much deeper issue.

What I am talking about is not what we ordinarily mean by saying I repress a certain emotion, I repress a certain thought—I repress my sexual desire, I repress a certain craving; it is not that. He said this is a much deeper issue. What issue?

One in which the self itself is so distrusted that any natural impulse is treated as a suspect.

Because you do not trust yourself. You do not love yourself, you think you are flawed, you think that if you do not keep yourself under control you will commit murder and arson, rob and plunder. So you examine every natural impulse and find it suspicious. You try to inoculate yourself with some kind of vaccine to defend against yourself. Can you defend against yourself? Of course not. This is a nearly impossible situation. Examining your impulses and thoughts is defending against yourself. You expect your motives to be selfish, because you have been told that your inner self must be selfish, your motives must be selfish. Because selfish motives must be explained, when you catch yourself having an unkind motive, you are almost deeply gratified—finally caught me, did you? You really do have selfish thoughts. Then you think, at least you are normal, because other people are selfish too, and I am selfish too.

Have you noticed this in yourself? Absolutely. Finding your own selfish side actually makes you happy, actually brings relief, actually makes you feel lighter—finally caught me, you are a selfish person. Do we not often have this kind of inner struggle every day? When I say you are not selfish, you yourself do not believe it. You say, I am just like everyone else, I have my own purposes too. Why must you insist on calling yourself selfish before you feel at ease? You see how powerful our education, our brainwashing is. You do not even dare admit that you are not selfish, that you are altruistic.

When you discover yourself harboring motives of goodwill, you do not believe them. You think, beneath this apparent altruism, there must be some evil, or at least selfish, motive that has escaped my notice. Do we not all have this thought when examining ourselves: Am I really that altruistic? Am I really that great? No, there must be some small motive in between that I have not discovered. If I am not doing it for money, could I be doing it for fame? If not for fame, could it be to make people admire me, to make people like me?

And as a human being, you are forever examining your impulses. Is this impulse right or wrong? I want to make money; I like this person of the opposite sex—is this impulse right or wrong? You reflect and examine yourself at every moment. But you far less often examine the products of your intellect—we rarely examine the results of our logical thinking; we feel they must be right, since they were arrived at through analysis, with a theoretical basis, so what could be wrong with them? Who dares say science is wrong? Who dares challenge science? Step forward and let me see. But challenging impulses is far too easy; anyone can challenge them, even you challenge yourself.

He said—

It may seem that impulsive actions are quite rampant in society, as in the behavior of fanatics, or in criminal behavior, or in the behavior of the young. But such activities instead show the strength of impulses that have not been allowed natural expression, strength that on the one hand is intensified, and condensed and focused into ritualized patterns of behavior, while on the other hand its expression is denied.

In real life, you often see the negative effects of impulses: acting on impulse and doing bad things, acting on impulse and doing irresponsible things, acting on impulse and causing great disaster—including criminals, including fanatics, including the irresponsible impulsive behavior of young people. But you only see that one side; you do not see that these activities instead reveal the rebellious strength of impulses that have not been naturally expressed. Take adolescent rebellion, for example—much of the reason adolescents rebel is that they have not naturally expressed their inner impulses; they have been suppressed, so they engage in many deliberately rebellious and impulsive behaviors. If you allow their impulses to be expressed naturally, expressed in small matters, they will not act so extremely.

What Seth means in this passage is this: you only see the negative side, and you do not realize that the cause of this negativity is precisely that the impulses were not expressed, rather than that the impulses were expressed and did bad things. You have understood it in reverse.

From Idealist to Fanatic

He says—

An idealist who believes the world is heading toward disaster and that he is powerless to stop it—after he believes his impulses are wrong and denies them, and after he has also blocked the expression of his power to influence others—he may, for example, hear the voice of God.

That voice may tell him to commit any kind of evil act, such as assassinating the enemies who stand in the way of his great ideal. And to others, he may appear to have a natural impulse to kill, and indeed to have an inner mandate to do so.

We will not expand on this example further, because after all it is a negative example. I am just giving everyone a reminder: some idealists, for example environmentalists, do things that are very extreme. I am not saying environmentalism is bad, I am just telling you that sometimes it is like this—they will do things they believe are absolutely justified for the sake of environmental protection.

Depending on the circumstances, such a person could be a member of a small fanatical group, or the head of a nation, or a criminal, or a national hero. They were all originally idealists, that is true. But they believe the world is heading toward destruction, and that they are powerless to stop it, so they believe their impulses are wrong. After denying their impulses, they seem to hear instructions from God, or some divine revelation, telling them to do something that blocks the realization of their ideal—to kill the people who stand in their way.

He says this person claims to act with the authority of God, and he feels that he is doing things under God's will.

The desire and motivation to act within each person is so strong that it cannot be denied.

This is a most basic characteristic—every person's motivation and desire to act cannot be denied. And when it is denied, it may appear in a perverted form. If you insist on denying people's basic desires and motivations, then there is a possibility that they will manifest in very perverted ways.

A person not only must act, but must act constructively, and cannot act destructively. And he must feel that he is acting for a good goal—whether an ideal good or a disguised good, a person must convince himself of this. Only when impulses are continually denied will that idealist turn into a fanatic.

Power Always Rests with the Individual

He said—

Power is natural. The power of muscles to move, or eyes to see, or the brain to think, the power of emotions—these represent true power. If you lack it, no amount of wealth or fame can ever substitute for that natural sense of power.

Power comes from nature, from a natural sense of power, just like the movement of your eyeballs, the movement of your skin and muscles. When you lose this sense of power, when your body cannot even move freely at will, then no amount of wealth or fame means anything anymore.

Power always rests with the individual, and all political power must come from the individual.

Power does not rest with groups, power does not rest with organizations, power must come from the individual. All political power must come from the individual. If political power does not rely on the manifestation of each person's power, but instead is obtained through suppressing everyone's natural expression, through suppressing everyone's natural impulses to gain organizational power, then that is false, that is not true power. The true power of an organization is a gathering, an eruption of the power that comes from each person's heart, unrepressed.

A democratic system is an extremely interesting form of government.

Because it demands so much individual consciousness. In a democratic system, individual consciousness must be emphasized, individual consciousness must be stressed, not collective consciousness. And because it must primarily rest on a belief in individual power—the core of a democratic system is a firm belief in the power of the individual.

In your country, that belief has persisted for so long, and it has been able to operate with such vitality even in the face of quite contrary accepted beliefs held by science and religion, which is truly a tribute to that belief.

In the America of 1979¹², the foundation and reliance of the democratic system is a firm belief in the greatness of individual power, a firm belief that individual power cannot be stripped away, cannot be overridden by any organization or institution. The power of the individual, the rights of the individual are supreme—this is a core belief of this country. What I find most amazing is that in such a country, where science is so advanced and religion is also so advanced—by all logic both of these should be zealots, religion is a zealot, science is also a zealot, only they themselves do not realize it—under the premise of these two large camps that have erased individual power, you have still preserved individual power so well, and still allowed individual power to have such vitality. He says this is truly a tribute to the belief in individual power.

The idea of democracy expresses a highly idealistic existence.

The ideas and institutions of democracy require certain conditions. It demands that political and social organizations be able, to some degree, to effectively put those ideals into practice. Without such political safeguards, legal safeguards, or safeguards of shared social understanding, it cannot be realized. So the reason why some countries cannot implement democracy is not primarily a matter of political system alone, a matter of political institutions alone; it also involves many deep-seated social issues.

When those organizations fail, when political and social organizations fail to put those ideals into practice, and the gap between the idealism and the good that is achieved becomes too great, then such conditions can turn some idealists into fanatics.

This session mainly discusses two things: one is impulse, the power we should trust and follow; the second is how fanatics come to be—not how that idealism turns into fanaticism.

He gives one possibility:

Those who very strictly follow the dictates of science and religion can change their positions in an instant. Scientists begin playing with psychic phenomena, and when they suddenly grow weary and disgusted with the limitations of scientific knowledge, they will give all their enthusiasm to what they consider to be the opposite, or intuitive knowledge. But in doing so, it blocks the rational part of themselves.

A scientist is originally rational. When he grows weary of the various limitations of science, he will turn completely to theology, religion, or the study of the most occult matters, and at that point he completely abandons the scientific training of decades, believing all of it was wrong. Newton is a classic example. In the last decades of his life, Newton turned to the study of the occult¹³. Previously he only believed in reason and blocked intuition; now he reverses and blocks reason and only believes in intuition—the same kind of fanaticism.

There is another type of person—

Businessmen who believed in Darwin's laws and the struggle for survival, who rationalized unfairness and even theft with the concept of survival of the fittest, suddenly become extreme fundamentalists of certain Christian doctrines.

He himself firmly believed in Darwin's laws and the law of survival of the fittest. He rationalized social injustice and criminal behavior as a necessary way for those at the bottom of society to survive, and in this way rationalized everything. These businessmen were originally focused on making money, and then suddenly one day they changed, began doing charity work, donated all their money, and became extreme religious fanatics. This kind of thing has happened in all times and places. Through this, he wants to gain a sense of power.

This is all a tangled attempt.

He wants to express a natural idealism in a real, practical world. We live in a real world, and this real world has its own reality. If you insist on applying idealism everywhere, when you cannot satisfy it, you begin to give up, to abandon yourself, to become decadent, or to take extreme measures to change society. These are all wrong. The way to change things is to start from the standpoint of your own life. For example, if you are a businessman, then look at how to help others from the perspective of a businessman, how to solve these problems from the perspective of your business. Not through a radical approach—donating all your money, establishing an organization, or joining some organization, and then using that organization to realize your idealism. This in itself is tangled. It means you do not acknowledge that we live in a real world, and only wish to live in an idealistic world.

Do You Still Trust Your Impulses?

Seth asks, how can you trust your impulses? For example, when you read about a person who committed murder because he had a strong impulse to do so -- at that point, do you still dare to trust your impulses? And this murderer said it was because the voice of God commanded him to do it.

How should you analyze this at that point? The reason this murderer did such a thing -- could it be because his previous impulses were not expressed normally? Those earlier small impulses of his were not expressed naturally, and in the end they accumulated and built up pressure, turning into this kind of result. This is a distorted form of expression. This in itself is not the fault of the impulse; it is the final evil consequence of his not acting on his impulses, of not expressing his impulses naturally in everyday life. It is not that expressing his impulses would have such bad consequences -- quite the opposite, it is precisely because he did not express them that such a result came about.

He gives an example --

What if some of you, right now, were to follow your impulses, and perhaps they would seem cruel or destructive?

Can you still trust your impulses now? Put the book down for a moment, pause, and think: if you were to follow your very first impulse right now, what would it be? You can write it down -- suppose what some people write down seems a little cruel or a little destructive. If that were your natural impulse, would you still trust your impulses? This is the question he wants to ask you.

Think it through carefully, get this question clear, and then you can truly understand your impulses, you can truly trust your impulses, and you can truly act according to the guidance of your impulses. Otherwise, in this moment you have not learned anything; you have only listened for the entertainment.

He says --

How do your impulses affect your future experience, and form the actual world of mass reality?

This question is also left for you to think about on your own.

The dictation for this session ends here. Seth ended the dictation at 10:42 and ended the session at 10:56. When he told Jane that her delivery was excellent and often very spirited, Jane said that this morning she had written half a page that was very much like Seth material, and that perhaps she would write a book of her own -- she meant the hero one, but that did not matter, and she did not care which of the two of them wrote it.

The content of this session is finished, and it is very, very important. If you digest and understand it carefully, then how you should act in your life, how you should do things -- you will be completely clear about it.

Session 859: Following and Blocking Impulses

Today's session, Session 859, began on Wednesday, June 6, 1979, at 9:14 p.m.

I don't know whether, after the last session, you actually went out into your life and practiced following your impulses. Jane is truly a person of action. She seriously identified, studied, and went about following her impulses. And what about you? After listening to the last session, were you able to persist in following your own impulses?

Ever since Seth began emphasizing impulses two sessions ago, Jane became especially aware of her own impulses while writing her new book, Heroes. Because she found herself facing a whole series of impulses to do other things, such as painting, or rereading her old poems from earlier years -- seemingly contradictory impulses.

Jane gave us a living example as proof: after Seth said to follow your impulses, she went out and practiced it in her life. And in practicing, she discovered that it ran contrary to what she had thought -- her mind wanted to write the new book Heroes, yet the impulses life gave her were to paint, or to read the old poems she had written back in 1963, before she began channeling the Seth material.

But fortunately, Jane did not stop to ask why. She simply tried it first and saw what happened. For example, on Monday and Tuesday she spent time reading those old poems written before 1963. The strange thing was, why did she have no impulse to write Heroes, but instead an impulse to read old poems? It was only last night that she finally understood, intuitively, the connection involved.

Jane is quite clever. Within two days she figured out why she was not writing the new book but reading old poems instead. Most of us may not yet have that kind of intuition, and cannot perceive that when we follow an impulse, it may seem to lead to results opposite to the goal we imagine we want to achieve. But Jane perceived it: she had been writing that book all along -- including while reading those old poems, she was writing that book. Heroes is not about how to attain an unattainable superego state, but about the obstacles blocking the path of actual self-realization, and that old poem was precisely dealing with such obstacles.

She said: "Unless you trust your present self, you cannot find your heroic self."

What she meant is, if you want to become a heroic self, you must first accept and trust your present self. There is no other way. Seth has always told us to be especially wary of negative Freudian and Darwinian beliefs -- the belief that you are flawed, that your subconscious and your impulses are unreliable. This is what Freud and Darwin have told us: Darwin told us we are flawed, that we are a kind of animal; Freud told us that the inner subconscious is very dark.

Jane said she suddenly found herself surrounded by that kind of negative belief of her own. What negative beliefs? The belief that her impulses were subconscious and therefore bad, that she still had problems and flaws within herself. All these beliefs blocked her from trusting her impulses. Do we carry these within ourselves? Think about it.

Jane said she finally saw the direction in which this book was going. The new book she was going to write -- this new poetry collection, Heroes -- what was its direction? It was to remove these obstacles. She wanted to resolve those beliefs for herself and for her readers. That was the purpose this new book was meant to achieve.

What seemed like reading old poems, something with no connection to writing a new book, actually gave the new book the direction in which it should be written. Through Jane's example we can understand that in life we should trust our own impulses, trust our own intuition, and stop doubting.

Seth says:

Again, you have been taught to believe that impulses in general are wrong, or at best that they represent only messages from an evil subconscious, pouring forth dark emotions and desires.

Our general social understanding is exactly this -- "impulse is the devil" has become a slogan for us. That statement is wrong. Change it to "impulse is an angel," and repeat it over and over in your heart. Without impulse, your life would have little meaning.

Protect your impulses. Release all the big impulses and the small ones. The reason you feel you cannot release them is that you are afraid of your own impulses -- you do not trust yourself, you believe there is a devil dwelling in your heart. So impulse becomes your inner demon. If your heart is bright, as Wang Yangming said, "My heart is bright, what more could I ask for¹⁴," where would a devil be? How could impulse be a devil? Your heart is bright, and your impulses all come from your heart, so they are bright too.

Freud and Darwin's Negative Beliefs

For example, many of you believe a basic theory of Freudian psychology:

The son naturally wants to replace the father in his mother's affections, and behind this son's love for his father lies a raging murderous intent.

This is truly an absurd, idiotic statement. At this point Seth was just short of cursing someone out -- he put it rather harshly too. Indeed, this is a bit too ridiculous. Many of Freud's views, I really don't even know what to say. After all, the man lived to a great age and achieved a great deal; at least in his era there was a need for him. But some of this stuff is just absurd beyond belief.

Take this one point -- do you think it's absurd beyond belief? Every son wants to kill his father and replace him in his mother's affections? Men here present, do you have this subconscious urge in your hearts? What kind of nonsense is this? What he means is that every man, every son, has an idea of wanting to commit incest with his own mother? Isn't this pure rubbish? Freud said a great many other things too -- just flip through his work and you'll see. For example, he said men love smoking because they didn't get enough milk as infants, an attachment to the nipple¹⁵ -- isn't that pure nonsense?

Jane had been reading her own old poems, and she was horrified to discover that these beliefs had appeared in her in a rather crude and condensed form. These erroneous, negative beliefs -- the examples cited above -- she had always held them. Until the Seth sessions began, she had followed an accepted account of consciousness, mainly derived from the subconscious. She essentially opposed those ideas, yet could find no better answers.

Seth said:

A self that lives so brilliantly, and that is equipped with such fine intelligence and reason, yet seemingly only in order to understand the importance of its own inevitable extinction. To project such an idea upon living beings is truly a tragedy.

What Seth means is that each of us, living so vividly and splendidly in real life, endowed with such high intelligence, yet we believe that we live only to understand the importance of our inevitable extinction. To put it simply, we believe we have only one life, and life has no great meaning -- just a few decades spent trying to find some meaning for ourselves. That is supposedly the entire meaning of life for those of us who live so brilliantly, who are so noble. To project such an idea upon living beings -- that is truly a tragedy. If you believe this idea, you live within this tragedy.

Seth said:

Once again, you cannot begin a true psychology unless you see the living self within a larger framework, with a greater motivation, purpose, and meaning than you now assign to it -- or, incidentally, than you assign to nature and its creatures.

If you cannot recognize that true, larger self, your psychology has no meaning whatsoever -- it doesn't even scratch the surface. If you cannot discover the true meaning your life gives you, or the greater motivation, purpose, and meaning that all things bring, and you only see the surface meaning -- only seeing each person's single lifetime, or the brief life of each animal or plant -- then trying to study it using only this one material-world lifetime will yield no real results.

He said:

You have denied many impulses, but we have also planned other impulses so that they can only express themselves in certain ways of action.

We have placed restrictions on impulses: impulses are fine, but they may only be expressed in this way -- this way is civilized, this way is polite, this way conforms to the norms. So we have placed many restrictions on impulses.

If any of you really still believe in the Freudian or Darwinian self, then you would not dare to examine the impulses of your own consciousness, for fear of finding some remnant thought of wanting to kill someone. I am not speaking hypothetically.

This really is the case. Each person does not dare to look at their own impulses, because they fear seeing those dark things within them.

An Example of a Woman

For example, a well-meaning woman recently came here to see Jane. She was worried about being too fat, and she felt frustrated because she lacked the self-discipline to diet. In her uneasiness, she had once seen a psychologist. The psychologist told her that her marriage might possibly be part of the problem.

Is this psychologist not ridiculous? This woman, because of her weight problem, felt she could not eat in moderation, so she went to see a psychologist. The psychologist told her, your obesity might be related to your marriage.

That woman never went back to see that psychologist again. Why? Because she was afraid -- she did not disbelieve the psychologist, she was afraid she might discover buried within herself an impulse to kill her husband, or to end the marriage. She was quite sure her fatness concealed some unfortunate impulses, but she did not have the impulse to kill her husband or to get a divorce. She was just afraid that if she dug them up, such impulses would be there, so she did not dare go back to the psychologist.

In fact, that woman's situation concealed her main impulse. What was this woman's main impulse? To communicate better with her husband, to ask her husband for clearer expressions of love -- this is not just this woman's impulse, it seems to be every woman's impulse. She did not have those dark thoughts.

Why did she feel her husband did not love her? Because she was too fat -- her husband was always saying unpleasant things about her full figure. Because of this, she felt her husband no longer loved her. And she could not express his love for her in the way she hoped, because her husband also believed that women -- if you let them -- would destroy a man's freedom, and he interpreted his natural need for love as an unfortunate emotional demand.

These two people, both husband and wife, believed that women were inferior. Not only did the husband believe this, the woman herself also felt she was inferior. And quite unconsciously, they followed a Freudian dogma.

Seth says:

We have been talking about concepts that are closely connected with your lives.

The man just mentioned often denied his personal impulses. As far as expressing affection toward his wife was concerned, sometimes he was not even aware of that impulse.

How can such a thing happen? Think carefully about whether you have seen it. Do you know how many families there are where, when the relationship between children and parents is bad, after therapy or some opening up, they naturally burst forth with such intense love for each other that they themselves are startled. They suddenly realize that they had a strong impulse to love their children, or the children discover they still love their parents -- no matter what harm that parent did to them. This impulse was something they had not discovered before -- before, they had only discovered that they hated each other.

So do not think you know every impulse. Many impulses are ones you have not noticed.

Seth says:

In other areas where you cut down your impulses to the point where you do not even recognize them, you close off possibilities.

Once you reach a certain point, you do not satisfy ordinary impulses, you do not satisfy small impulses, you do not satisfy big impulses, and gradually you cut down your impulses, until in the end you cannot recognize your impulses anymore -- because you have suppressed them all, you do not believe in them, you do not satisfy them, you only believe in the judgments of the intellect. All impulses have been sent to the cold palace by you, and they no longer come out.

But without impulses, you close off all possibilities. And you block those new beneficial actions that would themselves lead you out of the difficult situation. Because you do not believe your impulses, you will not do those things beyond your expectations. And these unexpected things often carry their own magical effectiveness -- they may be exactly the main action that can free you from this dilemma, or lead you out of this dilemma. But because you do not believe this impulse, you suppress it, and you remain stuck in this predicament.

But because they had all been taught that if left alone, your bodies, your minds, your relationships would inevitably deteriorate, they were afraid that any change would be for the worse.

That is, we have a viewpoint: if we do not control things with the intellect, our bodies will deteriorate, our relationships will deteriorate, our minds will deteriorate. Relationships need the intellect to maintain them, deliberately doing social activities -- this is the mistaken viewpoint of some of us. It is precisely because he believes this that he does not believe in impulses. He believes all these things need human intelligence to maintain them.

Some people even tell you that marriage needs to be managed, love needs to be managed, and so on. Look at the word "manage" -- it uses the intellect. From this you can see that many things circulating in society today are wrong, and even misleading.

They use their intellects to manage their bodies, wanting to preserve health, wanting to be healthy, using all kinds of methods to provide themselves with various possible ways of being healthy. Do you remember what Seth said before? The best way to treat your body is not to pay attention to your body, to hand the body over to the body itself to take care of. Any idea in your mind that wants to help your body is doing more harm than good -- remember! Doing nothing is the best way, trust the body, the body is the healthiest, and beyond that do nothing. All that health preservation and such things are nonsense. Relationships and the mind are the same.

Therefore people often react to events as if they themselves did not have the power to concretely change them. Their attitude toward life is as if: they are indeed limited, not only able to experience just one short life, but within that life, they are still victims of their own chemistry -- victims of the hormones secreted by their bodies -- accidental members of a flawed species, a species that is cruel to its very core.

This kind of sarcastic remark about humanity has been said many times, so we will not repeat it again. Many people believe that human nature is essentially cruel, essentially evil, that we are all controlled by these hormones and chemicals and cannot change. The facts are not so. I can tell you from my own personal experience that all of this is wrong. The so-called chemicals, the so-called hormones, have no effect on a person with firm beliefs. You must remember: beliefs create reality, beliefs are greater than everything.

An Example of a Breast Lump

Another female friend discovered a small tender spot on her breast. She was terrified by a whole barrage of negative suggestions that are treated as preventive medicine -- the public-service campaigns about breast cancer. She remembered them all too clearly, and was filled with a sense of doom. She went to see a doctor, and the doctor told her he did not believe anything was wrong, but to be on the safe side, she should still go get an X-ray. And so, in the name of preventive medicine, her body was given a dose of X-ray radiation that was basically entirely unnecessary.

Seth quickly cleared himself of any blame:

I am not suggesting that you should not see a doctor under such circumstances.

Because the weight of your negative beliefs about the body often makes it impossible for you to bear such a suspicion on your own. That is indeed the case. Many people who have studied Seth for a long time still do not trust Seth when it comes to the body, and still believe in modern medicine. There is no way around it -- they remain anxious and uneasy, worried that this or that problem will appear in their bodies. Seth says, there is no point in my saying anything -- this kind of behavior clearly demonstrates the beliefs of your group, and all of humanity is like this. No matter how much I say, it is useless; you will still go to see a doctor, because your negative beliefs are too heavy, and you simply cannot control them. One person alone cannot stand against the entire group and the entire society.

Seth went on:

That any of you from your position would so seriously consider that the existence of your exquisite consciousness could possibly be the result of a conglomeration of chemicals and various elements thrown together by a universe that was accidentally formed and will soon disappear.

If you truly believe that you are a pile of chemicals and a combination of elements formed by cosmic accident, Seth says, this is almost inconceivable to him -- how could you humans possibly think this way? But that is exactly how things are.

And all around you there is far more evidence proving that you are not the accidental product of the universe, not the abandoned child of the universe, and certainly not a physical body controlled by random chemical hormones -- but you turn a blind eye to it.

Entropy and the Order of Nature

What evidence? For example, the order of nature.

According to scientists' understanding, nature should be getting more and more chaotic. You know there is a concept called entropy -- ever since that movie Tenet, a lot of people have been talking about entropy¹⁶. What kind of concept is entropy? It is that, without external control, nature tends toward increasingly chaotic situations¹⁷. For example, if a drop of ink falls into water, the ink can only spread out in the water -- this is called entropy increase. In nature, under natural conditions, entropy decrease will not occur; the ink turning back into a single drop on its own will not happen.

But according to this scientific theory, our natural world should be getting more and more chaotic, should be a complete mess. If the Earth really had passed through the 4.6 billion years¹⁸ they talk about, it should be a wreck, not like it is now, and even less would there be all that natural beauty. You cannot explain it.

Second, human beings are also products of the natural world, right? Yet the appearance of human beings has actually made entropy smaller and smaller -- society has become more and more orderly, more and more regular. Whether it is the order of nature, or human beings -- who are also part of nature, part of the universe -- making this world more and more orderly, these are all results of entropy decrease. How could a natural system produce entropy decrease? So it does not fit logic, which proves that the theory of entropy is wrong.

More Evidence

Seth continues giving evidence:

This dream in which he projects your consciousness into other times and places, the creative drama.

How do you explain dreaming? In a dream, your consciousness creates a creative drama.

The precision of the spontaneous growth by which you go from fetus to adult without knowing how.

How did you grow from a child? Who taught you a method for growing up, or gave you a blueprint? How can you grow so well, with every aspect of your physique, muscles, and build perfectly proportioned, neither too much nor too little?

The heroic themes and the pursuit of ideals that permeate even the life of the most despicable scoundrel.

Even the most despicable person has, within his life, that hidden heroic theme and the existence of pursuing ideals. Isn't that so? The people we consider the most despicable, or the most brutal, they too have their own heroism in their hearts, and their own ideals. How many movies are about this -- in many films, the villain flips at the end, because under some special premise and opportunity, he begins to do things beneficial to humanity.

There are many such cases in real life too. A murderer went into a home and killed both the husband and wife, but when he saw a very small baby, not only did he not kill it, he even carried the baby out and found a place to settle it. If he had left it alone, the baby would have starved to death in the room. In the end, when the judge tried him, it was very strange -- how should he sentence him? He killed without blinking, killed the child's parents, yet he did not lay a hand on the child.

Seth's point is that all of these are evidence that you exist within a larger framework, not just living in this physical world. Yet we turn a blind eye to it and simply refuse to acknowledge it.

Seth's Argument

Seth went on to say:

If the universe existed in the way you have been told it does, then I would not be here writing this book. In that case, there would be no psychological pathway connecting our worlds—that is, the pathway between my world and yours. There would be no extension of myself that could allow you to travel across such a psychological distance, to the threshold of those realities that form my mental environment, at which threshold we exchange information. If the universe were structured in the way you have been told it is, then at least as far as you are concerned, the possibility of my existence would be equal to zero. There would be no Ruburt who could follow his unaccredited route, to lead away from the accepted beliefs of his time, and there would be no Ruburt to write down this material. He would never have acknowledged that original impulse to speak for me, and my voice would never have been heard in your world. The very possibility of this book's existence would never have been realized.

If the universe were the way other people have told you it is—for example, if scientists tell you the universe is just that way—then I could never have appeared at all, much less be here writing this book, and you would never be able to read this book either.

The mass world is formed by the results of individual impulses, and those impulses intermix with one another to form the launching pad for action.

Each person's impulses form a mass world. These individual impulses intermix and interact within this mass world, forming the launching pad for action—that is, giving rise to a kind of social action or mass action.

The content of this session is relatively brief and relatively simple. All right, that concludes the commentary on this part.

Before the session began, there was a note from Rob. Rob said that four weeks earlier, at the beginning of Session 854, he had written that Jane was not quite sure whether her new book should use the title "Hero," but she had been using it ever since. Until last night, she finally agreed that she had found a definite and highly original title she had been searching for—because "Hero" was not original at all. The Real God—A Manifesto of the Psyche¹⁹, that was her new title. She asked Rob whether it was a bit too bold, too avant-garde, because in Western thinking, "God" is not a word one can use casually. Rob told her it was not, that it was an excellent title, and that it said exactly what she wanted readers to know.

Living Surrounded by Impulses

Seth says, let us return again to the discussion of impulses, and discuss this possible action.

You live surrounded by impulses.

Every one of us lives surrounded by our own impulses, only we do not realize it. In your life, you must make countless decisions—whether choosing your career, choosing your spouse, choosing where you live. Experience can help you make some decisions, but long before you have many years of experience to support you, you have to make decisions.

Seth's words here carry deep meaning: in our lives we are making choices at every moment, and when making many choices you often rely on past experience. Yet for most choices, at the time you choose you have no experience. For example, a spouse—when you chose a spouse for the first time, did you have experience? No. Choosing a career—you have never worked in society before, do you know which industry or which job suits you better? You do not know. What major to study in college—do you know? You do not know either. Where to settle—with so many places in the world, did you investigate and study them all before settling on one place? Not that either.

So you will discover something very interesting: it seems you are using experience to decide so many major events in your life, yet for every one of these decisions you seem to have nothing to refer to, because you do not have that experience. Then what exactly do you use to make decisions? Think back, from your youth until now, from the time you could make decisions on your own, what has been making decisions for you? Is it your experience, or other people's opinions, or what truly follows the impulses in the depths of your own heart?

Session 860

Overall, whether or not you are aware of him—because some of you are conscious of it, and some of you are not—your life is indeed a psychological shape.

Each of your lives is the shape of your psyche, and that shape is formed by your decisions. What kind of decision you make determines what your life looks like. And your decisions are the result of impulses—the feeling of wanting to do this or that, of wanting to do things in this way or that way. Be sure to remember that all of our actions are the result of impulses. You make decisions because of personal considerations, and also because you seem to be responding to other people's demands and expectations of you.

Within the vast field of countless possibilities open to you, you do of course have certain guiding principles, otherwise you would forever remain in a state of indecision.

What he means is that at all these junctures in your life where decisions are required, you certainly have a set of guiding principles for making decisions—in engineering terms, a decision-making system. So what is your decision-making system? What do you base your judgments on? He says that actually you are all operating on impulse, but you yourself do not realize it. Of course, you may also rely on others, living in other people's eyes, because of personal reasons or other people's expectations and demands. But the most likely thing is still impulse.

Your personal impulses provide those guiding principles. Except for those who live for others—always living in their mother's eyes, their father's eyes, all kinds of other people's expectations—there is no need to say more about such people; they have never figured out how to live, never lived for themselves. Those who truly live for themselves all act under the guidance of impulse. Impulse is their guiding principle when making choices.

It enables you to see how you can make the best possible use of possibilities.

Impulse allows you to make the best possible use of possibilities. If it were not for impulse, you would proceed step by step, following the logic, reasoning, and analysis of the intellect to find an optimal solution—and that solution is often conventional, carrying no risk or extremely low risk, while at the same time forfeiting its possibilities. Your life would become very dull and unremarkable, because by avoiding risk, you also miss out on opportunities and possibilities.

Impulse is the best means of actualizing your own potential.

Many people do not know where their potential lies, and they do not follow their impulses, so their potential remains buried and suppressed all along. If you dare to let impulse take charge, to release your impulses, much potential is hidden in places you do not even know about. And in doing so, you also provide a constructive contribution to society as a whole—following your inner impulses is not only of tremendous benefit to the individual, but also of tremendous benefit to society as a whole. This is not how we ordinarily think about it.

When you are educated not to trust your own impulses, you begin to lose the power to make decisions, and once all of this begins to happen, you begin to lose your sense of power.

Because you are afraid to act. When you do not trust your own impulses, you lose the power to make decisions, lose the power to act, dare not act, and are torn in both directions. Many people find themselves in a predicament of indecisiveness—dissatisfied with life, yet not daring to venture out and create something new; dissatisfied with their current company, yet not daring to change jobs; dissatisfied with a relationship, yet not daring to change it. Many people are like this.

People Who Don't Know What They Want

Seth gives the example of a reader who wrote to Ruburt. This reader lamented:

I don't know what I want to do, or which direction to follow. I think I could make music my career, because I do have some talent in music. But on the other hand, I also want to study psychology. Lately I haven't been focusing on my music, because I'm so confused, so sometimes I also think I could become a teacher. At the same time I'm also meditating, and hoping the answer will come by itself.

A person like this doesn't trust any single impulse enough. Every one of these directions is actually an inner impulse of his, but he doesn't believe in them, can't fully believe in them, doesn't trust them enough, not enough to make him take action. He just thinks about them, and everything still remains in the same activity of possibilities.

Meditation must be followed by action.

This is also what I want to remind everyone of. Meditation is not an end in itself; it has no purpose in and of itself. Don't expect meditation to give you anything. At most, it lets you relax and pay attention to yourself; it is itself a state of joy. It lets you shut out the noisy worldly influences outside, close off the outer senses, and listen to the voice within—that is meditation. But meditation should be followed by action. You can't just finish meditating, feel pretty good, and then that's it, nothing follows.

Seth has a very good sentence coming up. Underline it:

True meditation is action.

Many people ask me, what is true meditation? The best meditation is action. You'll find yourself thinking of this sentence often in the future; carve it deeply into your mind. There isn't some imagined thing where you sit there perfectly still and composed, entering samadhi, moving up level by level through the four dhyanas and eight samadhis—that's someone else's business. For you, the best meditation is action. Eating, working, taking a walk, exercising, singing, chatting with friends, drinking wine, drinking water—all of these can be meditation. As long as you do something with complete concentration, forgetting both self and surroundings, when you enter the flow state, you are meditating. And Seth tells you, this is true meditation, not sitting there idly doing nothing. Of course, for beginners, they need a state like that to bring them into that feeling, because otherwise they don't know what it means to enter. But the true state is one you have to bring yourself into in the midst of everyday life.

People like this are afraid of making decisions, because they don't believe in their own inner impulses. They are afraid of their impulses.

Some of them are able to use meditation to numb their impulses.

Seth puts this very well—many people use meditation to numb their own impulses. They use meditation as a substitute for those impulses, and instead it numbs them. They say, I want stillness, I want ten thousand thoughts to return to one thought, I don't want to think about anything, I don't want to move, being perfectly unmoved is my goal—that is the state they imagine.

Many people ask me why I say thirty minutes of meditation a day is enough, and not to do it too long. Let me explain this to everyone again. First of all, this is said for ordinary people, for the majority of people. If you are a professional practitioner, then follow your own way. For most people, thirty minutes of meditation a day, at most an hour, is enough—don't go longer than that. Why? Two reasons.

First, whether you can enter that meditative state doesn't depend on the length of time. If you can enter a very good state, ten-some minutes is enough; some people can even reach a very good state in just a few minutes. If you can't enter the state, insisting on dragging it out for a very long time, thinking that stretching it out will let you enter—actually that's not necessarily true. Because the longer you sit, the more numbness in your legs and discomfort will come up, and then you still have to overcome those things, which makes it even harder to reach the natural, relaxed, fresh state you want.

Second, do meditation when you are at your most comfortable and most enjoyable. Meditation itself is a process of comfort, joy, and enjoyment. Don't treat it as homework; treat it as something you like to do. For example, if you like listening to music, treat meditation like listening to music; if you like pouring a glass of red wine and savoring it, treat meditation like savoring red wine. Some people like being intimate with their boyfriend or girlfriend—for example, he lies on your lap, or the two of you lean comfortably against each other, each reading your own book—that is also a rather comfortable state. Meditation is similar to that kind of state; it is itself a state of making yourself relaxed, at ease, and joyful. Don't imagine it as something profound, sacred, or whatever—if you do, you've already strayed from the main purpose of meditation.

Third, if meditation goes on too long, it will create a certain sense of detachment from real life. You feel that the meditative state is very good, so you keep pursuing that feeling, and then there will be detachment in your real life. If the time gets longer and longer, you'll find that one hour feels better, two hours is even better, and you do it longer and longer, once in the morning and once in the evening, spending four hours a day meditating, and your sense of detachment from real life will grow stronger and stronger. But true meditation—Seth has already told you here—and not just Seth, all truly master-level people, those who have entered that state, will tell you: true meditation lies in action, and action is the best meditation. There is no meditation better than meditating in action.

Impulse and Personality

Impulses are natural, spontaneous, constructive responses to the personality's abilities, potentials, and needs.

Remember what impulses are. The meaning of "personality" here is very broad—not just this one life of yours. This life of yours is called a fragment personality, meaning this single reincarnation can only be called a fragment personality. All your countless reincarnations added together are your personality, your complete personality. Impulses are natural, spontaneous, constructive responses to the abilities, potentials, and needs of this entire personality—not just this one life, but the whole personality. They are good, constructive, and they are what opens up your abilities and discovers your potentials. Because sometimes your potentials may be abilities you already had in past lives, only you don't know it, but through these impulses, they can be brought out.

They are meant to serve as guiding forces.

Impulses are meant to serve as guiding forces. Don't underestimate impulses.

Fortunately, usually children learn to walk before they are old enough to be taught that impulses are wrong.

Why does Seth say "fortunately"? He means that if adults told children from a very young age that impulses are wrong, then they wouldn't even be able to learn to walk.

Fortunately, before your belief systems begin to erode the child's self-confidence, his natural impulses toward exploration, growth, fulfillment, action, and power are strong enough to give him the necessary springboard.

He means that before you start remembering to tell the child that impulses are wrong, he has already learned to use the power of his impulses, and has learned all the exploration, growth, fulfillment, action, and power he needs. If he didn't have the drive of these impulses, he couldn't possibly learn to walk, couldn't learn to speak, couldn't explore this unknown world that is full of danger to him. Yet he trusts this world, trusts himself, and trusts his inner impulses even more. So when children do things, the family says "a newborn calf fears no tiger"—he doesn't know what fear is.

Let me say something even more extreme, which Seth was too polite to say here—think about the first time, whether male or female, when you were together with someone of the opposite sex in a romantic relationship, what guided you? Was it reading some love manual, some love bible, some book on love guidance? Weren't you all under the guidance of impulse? Why do you recall the romances of your youth as being so beautiful? Isn't that all the result of impulse? Extend it further: the first time between a man and a woman, wasn't that all brought about by impulse? Who first watched a lot of adult films, watched a lot of instructional material, and then went and did it? Who wasn't already exploring in a state of ignorance and confusion? Weren't those all impulses? To put it even more bluntly, if human society had no impulses, life itself couldn't even begin. So why do people need to oppose these impulses? Isn't that interesting? Here I'm expanding on what Seth didn't spell out.

You have physical adult bodies, and the pattern set for each adult body exists within the fetus—and again, fortunately, the fetus's impulses follow their own direction, uninfluenced by adults.

Each of you has an adult body, but this adult body was already written into the fetus's template, or into the direction of the fetus's impulses, while it was still a fetus. As long as the fetus follows the direction of its own impulses, it can naturally grow into an adult. Even if at the very beginning it was just a fertilized egg, just a single cell, it can still grow. What it relies on in between is impulse—the fetus impulsively follows its own direction, and at that time you can't educate it, and it doesn't listen to you either; it just grows into a complete adult form in its own way.

No one told the fetus that it was impossible for it to grow from a tiny organism into a complex adult structure.

Because you couldn't tell it even if you wanted to, and it couldn't understand what you were saying anyway. Seth says with gentle sarcasm: you see, you want to influence it, but you can't, so the fetus is very fortunate—it grows into a human form precisely because it follows the direction of its own impulses.

When you humans were in your mother's womb, you all had such tiny, thin, thread-like soft legs.

In the mother's womb, those little arms and legs at the very beginning were as thin as threads. Those legs can now climb mountains and stride across great boulevards, because they followed the shape of those legs' own impulses.

And even their atoms and molecules were seeking their own most favorable possibilities.

Not just cells, fetuses, tissues, legs—even atoms and molecules are seeking their own most favorable possibilities.

And in a way you do not understand, even those atoms and molecules recognize and follow that consciousness—the innate impulse toward action—and accordingly make their own decisions.

Atoms and molecules themselves have an impulse toward action, innate means it was there from the beginning, and every atom and molecule has this. No matter what you call them—atoms, molecules, cells, proteins, DNA, whatever—after they move toward this impulse to action, action brings results, and then they make their own decisions. This is crucial.

Consciousness attempts to grow toward its own ideal development.

Every consciousness will grow toward that consciousness's own ideal development. You don't need to manage it; it will grow in its ideal way on its own.

That also promotes the ideal development of all the organizations in which it participates.

Not only does it provide direction for its own ideal development, but its individual development and direction also provide an ideal development for the overall organization in which it participates. The interests of the individual and the interests of the group are consistent—both are results oriented toward the best possible direction. You just need to follow your impulses.

The Problem of Ideals and Reality

So we come back again to the problem of ideals and reality -- this is a question everyone asks.

When and how do your impulses affect the world? Again, what is that ideal, good impulse? And why does it seem that your experience is so far from that ideal? So far that your ideals seem to be all evil?

Many people say after learning this material, "I accept and understand what you say, but sometimes I cannot tell which are my impulses and which are decisions made by my ego. For example, if I want to make a lot of money, is that an impulse, or is it a thought born of the ego's fear? I cannot tell them apart." So Seth continues to discuss this question -- getting to the problem in reality: which impulse is good, and which impulse is ideal? Why are we so far from the ideal? Why does it seem that we clearly want to do good, yet the result turns out bad?

This is a very good question. I hope that when you listen to the interpretation of the later chapters, you can first try to answer these questions yourself, try to answer them on your own, and leave your answers in the comments section or the group so we can discuss them together. Everyone's answer may be different.

Seth ends this chapter after saying this, and the next chapter begins in this session.

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注释与核实

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

2. Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation, "Watergate" (https://www.fbi.gov/history/cases-and-criminals/watergate) ↩

3. Source: U.S. National Archives, "The Creation of the Nixon Library" (https://prologue.blogs.archives.gov/2015/10/29/the-creation-of-the-nixon-library/) ↩

4. Source: U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, "Visit the Museum" (https://www.nixonlibrary.gov/visit/visit-museum) ↩

5. Source: PBS, "God in the White House" (https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/godinamerica-white-house/) ↩

6. Source: U.S. Senate, "Select Committee on Presidential Campaign Activities" (https://www.senate.gov/about/powers-procedures/investigations/watergate.htm) ↩

7. Source: U.S. National Archives, "NARA Exhibit: American Originals, Part 2: Contemporary United States to the present)" (https://www.archives.gov/exhibits/american_originals/contemp.html) ↩

8. This claim could not be verified. ↩

9. Source: Peter Rodgers/Physics World, "The double-slit experiment" (2002) (https://physicsworld.com/a/the-double-slit-experiment/) ↩

10. This claim could not be verified. ↩

11. Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation, "Jonestown" (https://www.fbi.gov/history/cases-and-criminals/jonestown) ↩

12. The session was held in 1979. ↩

13. Isaac Newton devoted considerable time in his later years to alchemy and biblical chronology. ↩

14. According to Mike's original words, "My heart is bright, what more could I ask for"; upon verification, it should be "The original sentence recorded in Chronological Biography of Master Yangming is 'This heart is bright, what more is there to say,' not 'My heart is bright, what more could I ask for.'" (Source: Deng Guoyuan and Wang Dayin, "Doubts and Dialectics on Wang Yangming's 'Deathbed Words'—With a Discussion of the Differences between the Jiajing Edition and the Complete Book Edition of Chronological Biography of Master Yangming," https://acc.gzu.edu.cn/2021/0514/c5649a151628/page.htm) ↩

15. This claim could not be verified. ↩

16. This claim could not be verified. ↩

17. Source: OpenStax, "Physics" (https://openstax.org/books/physics/pages/12-3-second-law-of-thermodynamics-entropy) ↩

18. Source: U.S. Geological Survey, "Introduction" (https://www.usgs.gov/youth-and-education-in-science/introduction) ↩

19. This claim could not be verified. ↩