Mike's commentary · The Nature of Personal Reality, Chapter 10

The "Introduction" and "Key Points" of this chapter were summarized by an AI editor based on the main text below; they are not words spoken by Mike during the 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 opens with the visit of a young psychotherapist who treats patients with LSD, using it as a lead-in to discuss the essential difference between natural awareness and drug-induced forced awareness. Seth points out that natural grace and states of awareness mobilize cellular memory and benefit health; heavy doses of LSD, by contrast, artificially create disaster areas in the psyche, slaughter the ego, alter deep physiological and psychic structures, and a new ego is born carrying fear. The conscious mind and beliefs direct the unconscious to create reality; dreams, art, sex, and the like are natural healing pathways, and the body is a living statue.

Key Points of This Chapter

• Natural grace and the state of illumination are innate human gifts that mobilize cellular memory and benefit health; heavy doses of LSD, by contrast, are an artificial slaughter of the psyche, killing the original self and altering deep physiological and psychic structures.
• The new self born from drug-enforced illumination carries a fear of destruction, can no longer trust the outer world as it once did, and brings new problems in its wake.
• The conscious mind is not powerless; it directs the stream of the unconscious, and beliefs create reality; it is a mistake to distrust the conscious mind and seize inner knowledge by force through drugs.
• Dreams, art, sexuality, and sound are natural healing systems, more effective than drugs; the healing action of dreams has already taken place within the dream, and dream interpretation can only be done by oneself.
• The body is a living statue, with beliefs directing the cells, molecules, and atoms; beliefs about age, illness, and the like will affect the body's expression.

Main Text

Chapter 10: The Nature of Spontaneous Illumination and the Nature of Forced Illumination

The Seth book The Nature of Personal Reality is divided into two parts. The first part is "Where You and the World Meet." Now we begin the second part, whose title is: Life as the Nature of Your Creativity, the Body as Your Own Unique Living Sculpture, Life as Your Most Intimate Work of Art, and the Nature of Creativity Within Your Personal Experience. The second part begins with Chapter 10, titled "The Nature of Spontaneous Illumination and the Nature of Forced Illumination."

The term "illumination" may not be fully understood by everyone. What is meant by spontaneous illumination and forced illumination? Illumination can be understood as a kind of awakening, as if your perception has been lit up. The character "ming" here carries the meaning of being lit, of being illuminated. We can understand it as something akin to enlightenment or insight. In other words, this chapter discusses: do you awaken, do you come to realization through your own natural methods, or do you force yourself into awakening through chemical substances? What is the essential difference between these two? How do their fundamental natures differ?

This chapter follows directly from the second part of Chapter 9. A young psychotherapist was using LSD, a hallucinogenic drug, to treat patients with psychological disorders. During his discussions with Jane, Seth also participated in the discussion. And this event, this visit from such a guest, led to the creation of the content in Chapter 10.

This issue may not be a problem in many countries, because hallucinogens are classified as strictly controlled narcotics in many countries. Whether it is ayahuasca, psilocybin mushrooms, or various other drugs, narcotics, and hallucinogens, in many countries they are all illegal substances, and contact, sale, or use carries very severe penalties. For example, in Taiwan, if you come into contact with ayahuasca—which local tribes use to induce so-called super-perception, super-sensory experiences—you could face life imprisonment, or at least a minimum of ten years¹. In mainland China it is the same: contact with hallucinogens is severely punished by law. In some other countries, these drugs—not at the level of heroin or cocaine—are more loosely regulated in certain places. So this problem is more serious in Western societies, where people use drugs or hallucinogens to obtain certain sensations; whereas in some Eastern countries, this problem is not widespread. The background of this book is the United States, so he felt it necessary to emphasize this point. The reason for the emphasis is that some psychologists had even begun using these drugs to treat patients. Seth felt this problem had become very serious—if psychologists were treating it as a therapeutic method for people with psychological or mental illnesses, Seth felt this was a very important and very serious issue, and he felt it necessary to discuss it here.

This is also a question many people are interested in—although they do not have the courage to try it, nor the opportunity to try it, they have always wondered and always thought about it: what is the difference between the state we enter during meditation and spiritual practice, and the state entered after taking hallucinogenic drugs? If taking drugs can achieve the same effect, can bring you into the same realm and state as meditation, then why should we meditate? Why not just take some drugs? So this chapter has great reference value and significance for many people. Let us look at how Seth considers the effects of these forced hallucinogens on people.

A Young Man Searching for Truth

He said that this young man was the assistant of a famous physician. He was using hallucinogens to treat patients. He wrote asking for a session to be held for him. On November 13, 1972, he came, and that evening he attended the ESP class that Ruburt held for him, and the next evening he attended the ESP class again. Seth said:

I spoke to him on both occasions.

Seth spoke to him on both occasions, but not all of those words are included in this book; only a portion is included. Chapter 9 already introduced him: he had spent a period of time studying the therapeutic functions of drugs. Before that, he had wandered in India, and eventually followed a guru. Later he left the guru to follow a physician—to follow a doctor of modern medicine.

Like many young men through the ages, he was on a journey through life searching for truth, turning over all the stones one by one, striving to find the methods that could help him discover the "Tao."

"Tao" here uses an Eastern perspective, the idea that there is a "Tao" in this universe and world, a Tao that cannot be spoken of directly, that must be discovered and realized. "Turning over all the stones one by one"—if you have ever caught crabs under rocks, you know you have to turn over every stone and look underneath to see if there is a crab. His meaning is probably that truth is hidden beneath one particular stone. This young man would try all kinds of knowledge, all kinds of things that supposedly could bring him truth.

In real life it is the same. Many of our readers or listeners have certainly come into contact with many aspects of traditional culture before this, and have also come into contact with many other religions, and have also read many other spiritual materials. No matter what kind of material, no matter what kind of thing, for coming into contact with the Seth material today, all of it is actually helpful. In this process, he may have accidentally—through some unknown coincidence—come into contact with Seth, come to know the Seth material. Every person goes through things like this in the process of searching for truth in life.

Meditation had brought him some realizations. But in India, the guru told him he must obey blindly. If you have studied Tibetan Buddhism or the esoteric teachings related to Hinduism, you will know that they require you to study with a guru. The biggest difference between them and traditional religions is this: in traditional Buddhism, only the Buddha is recognized, and it is enough to follow Shakyamuni's teachings or the Buddhist scriptures; but in esoteric Buddhism, you must find a guru to lead you into the methods of practice. The guru's status is extremely high; you must regard the guru with the same reverence as the Buddha himself, obeying completely and blindly, listening to everything he says without the slightest doubt. Basically you have two masters: one is the Buddha, one is the guru, equally important. As for other matters in esoteric Buddhism, such as Vajrayana, the female Buddha, and so on, we will not discuss them here today; we can talk about them another time if there is an opportunity. In any case, among these Indian gurus, he basically required blind obedience. This denied your own capacity for thinking, your freedom of thought. So he began to find it unbearable, and went to find a doctor, to follow and study under a physician. This physician was a famous doctor who gave him more freedom.

At least the door to truth within his own soul might perhaps be opened through chemical means.

Therefore, our seeker returned to America and became part of a large organization. The organization to which this famous physician belonged basically attempted to open people's spirituality through chemical methods, through pharmaceutical means, to see whether people with mental or psychological illnesses could be cured. This young man joined this organization and had been using chemical drugs to treat patients all along. But he still had some questions and doubts in the middle of it, which is why he came to find Jane, wanting to consult Seth about what exactly was going on in all of this. From this we can see that this young man was very eager to learn; he would find such a channel to contact Seth.

He saw patients unhappy, and mental patients being brought to the new temple of truth, in which chemicals replaced the so-called holy communion.

What is the new temple of truth? It is using chemical substances for treatment. He drew an analogy—in religion there is the concept of holy communion. He felt that this method did have some benefits for certain people, but he also feared it might cause unnecessary and dangerous interventions. Under controlled conditions—that is, with someone supervising, someone monitoring—he himself also took the drug several times. This young man had a very experimental spirit; since he was treating patients with the drug, he also wanted to try the actual effects himself. He started with small doses, then used larger doses. During this process of taking the drug, he encountered some particularly frightening situations. At that point the doctor suggested he take another heavy dose to confront himself. Although he was not very willing, he reluctantly agreed.

The experience was so shattering that he immediately asked the doctor to give him an antidote.

After taking this kind of chemical hallucinogen, if you quickly seek medical treatment, doctors have counteracting chemical drugs that neutralize or suppress the effects. He said, hurry up and give me another dose of the antidote. When he did this, he knew in his heart that it was against the rules—you cannot ask for another dose of the antidote halfway through. But regardless, they did not give it to him. He later said he was glad he was forced to see it through to the end—without using the antidote, letting the drug continue all the way through, so he could feel it from beginning to end.

Yet deep doubts brought him here, and will ultimately lead him away from this method of treatment, into new areas.

Seth said that after he arrived here, after I communicated with him, he would be led away from this method of treatment and into another area. So after this young man heard what Seth had to say, he would no longer adopt this method for treating himself or others.

A Digression on Drugs

Seth said:

Many people have come to me, or written to me, after experiencing terrifying hallucinations. Especially young people who have been searching for truth are easily seduced into seeking it through the direction of chemicals.

Some young people searching for truth are easily seduced into seeking truth through the direction of chemicals. This is very normal—young people are bold, and they are unwilling to accept years of meditation, spiritual practice, and sitting in stillness. They think it is too slow, too boring, they cannot sit still, like a young monkey jumping around, unable to settle down. They always want to use a fast method to enter that state. When they hear that taking a certain drug can achieve a similar effect, they want to try it. So many people who initially start using drugs do so out of curiosity. This kind of curiosity is very harmful. The content Seth writes in this chapter is actually for those who do not know what hallucinogens are, who do not know what drugs are—through Seth's description—to make you give up this curiosity, to no longer want to try. This is a very terrifying kind of drug, which is why Seth discusses this issue very formally here.

This kind of thought and idea often appears in reality. I used to see related reports frequently in the past. The one that left the deepest impression on me was a real case: a female college student, at school, was urged and seduced by other classmates into starting to use drugs, and once she was hooked, her life was completely ruined. Her mother was a doctor, and no matter how she tried to persuade her daughter to quit, sending her to various rehabilitation centers, using all kinds of methods, accompanying her through withdrawal, nothing worked.

I want to emphasize here that some drugs are such that once you touch them, you can never quit for the rest of your life. Do not believe those fantasies that say there are various methods to quit drugs. Some can be quit, but some, once touched, can never be quit. You must have this mental preparation; do not fantasize about any "I will just try it once, and then I will quit later."

At that time, the mother said that this daughter was her only daughter, her most beloved daughter. She said to her daughter: "I do not believe this drug cannot be quit! Fine, I will use drugs together with you now, and I will quit to show you. I will personally demonstrate for you, I will show you how to quit drugs. I refuse to believe this thing cannot be quit. It is just that your willpower is not strong enough, your will is not firm enough." Then the mother, in order to save her daughter, also began using drugs, wanting to set an example for her daughter.

The result, as you can imagine—in the end, both mother and daughter fell into the vicious cycle of drug addiction and could not extricate themselves. All the family wealth, all the valuable things were sold off, the property was gone, they could not work, they had no source of income, and in the end they fell into a very tragic situation: both mother and daughter had to go out and sell their bodies to get money for drugs. This is a real case. Having said this, I want to tell everyone: never attempt anything like this. Seth will go on to explain why this kind of situation occurs—how great the influence of these hallucinogens is on people, and to what extent. After he finishes explaining, you will understand why we cannot touch or come into contact with these things.

The State of Grace and the State of Illumination

Seth is very compassionate; he does not avoid any issue. He will directly explain to you what drugs are really about.

As the most fashionable way to find truth, they took LSD as the most fashionable way to find truth. I am not speaking here specifically of marijuana, which is an entirely different thing. Marijuana is a natural product of the land. I am speaking of a chemical, a product of your technological knowledge.

Seth considers marijuana to be something that grows naturally from the earth, and human beings have their own ability to digest and absorb things produced by the natural earth; whereas for things made in chemical laboratories, things created through molecular synthesis, it is very difficult for people to process them—they cannot digest them, cannot absorb them, and are completely unable to cope with them.

Regarding marijuana, you will know why in many American states recreational marijuana has been legalized. But under federal law, possession of marijuana is still illegal and a felony², classified as a drug trafficking offense; in some states, recreational marijuana has been legalized, and it is like buying leisure products—there are dedicated marijuana shops. Marijuana has also been used in China since ancient times³. But in the vast majority of countries in the world, marijuana is still a drug and still illegal. Do not think that because some American states have legalized it, it is therefore legal everywhere else. In many, many places, marijuana is the same as any other drug; it is an illegal act.

But Seth does not discuss human social morality and legal issues; he only considers it from a spiritual perspective—marijuana is a natural thing, and it is different from chemical substances.

When you are fairly happy and satisfied in daily life, you may be said to be in a "state of grace."

When you are fairly happy and satisfied in daily life, you are in a state of grace—this is the most primal, most basic, most natural state of grace. The state of grace was already discussed in the first part of Chapter 9, so I will not repeat it here.

When you feel at one with the universe, or encounter some special experience in which you seem to have transcended yourself, on such occasions you may be said to be in a state of illumination. And this has many different degrees and levels.

When you feel at one with the universe, or encounter some special experience—opening the inner senses, gaining extrasensory abilities, telepathy, clairvoyance, clairaudience, including out-of-body experiences, flying in the sky, and so on—after that, you feel you have transcended yourself. Here you must remember: it is "seem to have" transcended yourself. Seth's phrasing here is very subtle—"seem to have"—you must remember this.

On such occasions, you may be said to be in a state of illumination, a state of realization. He refers to this kind of thing as a state of meditative absorption, a state of awakening, or a state of enlightenment—you are at one with the universe, you have transcended your own self, and you have gained abilities and powers that ordinary people do not have. There are very many different levels and degrees within this; each person's state and level within this is completely different. Between one enlightenment and another, between one illumination and another, between one realization and another, the differences are still very great.

Seth does not elaborate on this here, but remember that he used two phrases—"you feel" and "seem to have." These are two very crucial phrases. When you feel at one with the universe, you have not actually become one with it yet. When you truly become one with it, you do not have this "feeling," because the premise of "feeling" at one with the universe is that you feel you are you and the universe is the universe, and then you and the universe merge together; but when you truly become one with the universe, you do not have this feeling—you are the universe, so what is there to be at one with or not? The premise of oneness is that there must be two things to merge together. So he says you "seem to have" transcended yourself—these so-called special abilities or extrasensory perceptions are only an enhancement of your perceptual abilities at a certain stage. Have you truly transcended yourself? He says "seem to have"—in fact you have not yet transcended yourself; this is only an enhancement of extrasensory perception. You see how rigorous and profound Seth's language is.

Speaking of this, it is actually the same principle as in Buddhism. In the state of meditation, the state of meditative absorption, or the state of illumination, the abilities and divine powers, the miracles you see and perceive, the sense of oneness with the universe—all of these are still forms. As long as they are forms, they are illusory. When all these forms truly disappear, only then do you enter a higher level. When you still exist within these forms—"I am at one with the universe, I see my small self, I see my greater self, the small self and the greater self have merged together"—this is a feeling many people online have. What I tell you is this: you can enjoy this feeling, explore it with curiosity, enjoy the process, but do not make too many judgments and assumptions in this state, do not think "I have reached some level, have I already attained completeness?" When you still have forms, when you still have feelings, your level is still only at a certain level, and you have not yet reached that ultimate state. Seth used two phrases here that many people might read past without noticing; I am specifically bringing them out here to introduce them to you. Do not enter a small state of feeling and become complacent—in fact, you have only just entered the door.

Cellular Memory and Cosmic Memory

Seth continued:

Generally speaking, in any such state, your health benefits.

As long as you enter this state of satisfaction, happiness, and grace, or have experiences of feeling at one with the universe and extrasensory perception, it is beneficial to your health.

Although you may still have some impediments in terms of beliefs.

His meaning is that you still cannot reach the ultimate—to use Buddhist terminology, you are still attached to forms. But whether or not you are attached to forms, whether or not your beliefs have reached the ultimate state, your body and your health benefit from it.

These natural states activate within your cells the memory of past joyful experiences.

This is memory within the cells, not memory in your brain. All joyful memories will be recalled, and that memory is triggered by responses to certain special events in your life, whether or not you are conscious of them. To put it plainly: in this natural state, you will activate your cellular memory, bringing out all the joyful and beautiful memories stored in cellular memory. It is not memory in your brain—remember, it is cellular memory—not just beautiful memories in the brain. It is far more intense than that, because it is joy within the cells. As we say jokingly, every cell in my body is laughing, every cell is in ecstasy, every cell is in a state of joy. In the state of grace, think about it—every cell in your body is joyful, so what does that feel like? That kind of joy—in Buddhism it is called "dharma joy," and we ordinarily call it ecstasy—is indescribable, not the ordinary kind of joy found in regular memory.

This personal cellular memory, with the activation of other levels within the cells to varying degrees, again, each atom and molecule contains the "memory" of its "previous" experiences.

Molecules and atoms all have their previous memories, memories of joyful and happy experiences. Depending on the different degrees of the state of illumination or grace, large amounts of memory within the cells that do not necessarily involve your personal experience are activated. Although your own participation and the events of your life can appear within cellular memory in a manner entirely different from the one you are familiar with.

The meaning of this passage is: the states of grace and illumination do not necessarily involve the cellular memory of your personal experience, but they may. Although your own participation and the events of your life will at this time manifest in another way, and this way may be entirely different from what you actually experienced. For example, in real life, perhaps the moment your girlfriend said yes to your proposal was your happiest moment; but in the state of illumination, that feeling of happiness and ecstasy is entirely different—it might be the feeling of bathing in a spring breeze, or the ecstasy of lying on a lawn in summer looking up at white clouds drifting by, with the spring breeze on your face and birdsong and flowers all around, or you merge into the air, merge into the fragrance of flowers, or you transform into a blade of grass, a tree, and can feel their perceptions. These feelings in the state of grace and illumination are different from the experiences you have had in real life, because they emerge from cellular memory, even from atomic and molecular memory. Very often, after entering a meditative state or a state of absorption, the things you see are sometimes related to things in your reality, and sometimes entirely different—things you have never encountered, things that have never appeared in your life experience, and you have no idea where they come from.

For example, actually any event in your life is written into the memory of the universe.

If you are interested, you can look up something called the "Akashic records." People who study the Akashic records will tell you: there is a cosmic record in the universe that records all things, any event, of your life. Because at the level and plane of the Akasha there is no time, it knows both your past and your future. Many people are now studying and exploring the Akashic records, and there are many people online who charge money to read your Akashic records for you, roughly several thousand RMB. They will enter a meditative state; they do not need to know you, you just give them your name, and they can access your Akashic records and then come back and tell you certain things.

Some people will ask: if they can see my present, past, and future, what is the basic difference between this and fortune-telling? There is a great difference here—the Akashic records only show you several possibilities for your future, and they tell you the one they consider most likely, which is related to the skill level of the person. Some people who read the records are very skilled and see relatively specific things; others are average, and what they see is of no real help to you. And if you have studied spiritual things, there is no need for you to look at this—your future is created by yourself, and if you can create everything, do you still need to look at it? No. People who have studied spirituality are not interested in their past lives or future lives, because you only focus on the present, live in the present. When you live in this present moment, you possess past lives and future lives; you have everything, you are completely satisfied, and you do not need to know anything.

But for many young people in real life, the Akashic records are like using hallucinogens to pursue truth—they also want to use the Akashic records to know their future lives, the trajectory of this current life, and their relationship to previous lives. They always want to flip over the cards and see what the hidden card really is. My suggestion is: there is no need. If you go through appropriate study and practice, you can also read the Akashic records yourself; there are many materials and learning methods online.

Therefore in a state of illumination, personal cellular memory is energized.

What does "energized" mean? It means that of all the events of your past life, the vast majority you may have forgotten, but your cellular memory remembers them all. At this time it re-energizes these cellular memories, calling these memories back again.

In addition, there is a deeper understanding, in which your own birth and death may or may not be explained.

In the state of illumination, all the experiences of this life are recorded in the cellular memory of your cells, and they will be awakened, re-awakened. You will remember all the things you may have forgotten—things you experienced in childhood, things you experience daily—it is like an emotional video recorder that records everything you experience, every minute and every second, and you can rewind and watch any of it. In some deeper situations, your birth and death can also be explained—your past lives and future lives will all have explanations. But it is also possible that you get nothing at all; this is not guaranteed.

Natural Endowments

When left alone, you will spontaneously experience these states of grace and illumination at various times. Although you may not use these terms, you will feel inner peace, you will feel at one with the world, or you will feel that you have transcended yourself, suddenly feeling that you have become part of an event or phenomenon that you ordinarily would not consider to be yourself.

"Suddenly feeling that you have become part of an event or phenomenon that you ordinarily would not consider to be yourself"—this is an out-of-body experience, or suddenly being drawn into something that seems unrelated to you, as if entering a parallel world.

So such experiences are naturally a part of your endowment.

Remember this: such experiences are naturally a part of your endowment. When you are experiencing these things, do not make a big fuss, do not cry out in astonishment—these are abilities that everyone has. In your most natural state, you can spontaneously enter the states of grace and illumination.

Your consciousness is a part of your inner self, and it is constantly changing. In terms of the consciousness of the species, this is a very important development. This is what we need. Consciousness draws its strength from the source of vitality and regenerative power.

Consciousness draws its strength from the source of vitality and regenerative power -- that is, from the inner self.

The Limitations of Psychologists

Psychologists usually only see people who have problems, while happy people do not need to visit them. Very few people study or discover why happy people are happy.

We are all studying why people get sick, why they are unhappy, why they get depression, but very few people study why people are happy. This answer is very important. You do not know why people are happy, and you only want to solve the problems of those who are unhappy and turn them into normal people, yet you have not even studied clearly where the source of happiness comes from.

In therapy using heavy doses of LSD, a chemically induced, unnatural state of madness occurs. By madness, I mean that consciousness is forced into a state of powerlessness. There is not only a real assault on the psyche, but also an assault on the very framework that allows you to exist rationally in the world you know.

What framework? It is the framework that allows you to exist rationally in this world you know.

Heavy Doses of LSD: Murder of the Psyche

Continuing from the previous session. Seth says here that heavy-dose LSD therapy kills the ego -- that is, your sense of identity, the you by which you exist in this physical world. And it does so through a powerful chemical agent, which is equivalent to completely destroying your self-cognition.

Of course, the ego cannot be destroyed during physical life. As long as you still have a physical body, your ego cannot be destroyed. Only when you transcend the physical -- for example, after you die and no longer have a body -- does your ego cease to exist. Therefore, if one ego is killed, another will necessarily emerge from the inner self -- the inner self is their source.

Seth here provides a summary that captures the essence of the abuse of heavy-dose LSD. What he means is that this chemical state of madness directly kills your sense of identity, that is, your ego. But because your ego itself emerges from the inner self, and your physical life requires an ego to direct it -- without an ego you cannot possibly have life -- your ego must exist. So when you kill the original ego, a new ego will emerge.

Let us continue reading:

Under such unnatural circumstances, you truly force the ego consciousness to face its own death, in an encounter that need never have happened. At the same time, the body is struggling for its own life and vitality, and you bring about an extremely serious dilemma.

That is, your body is struggling for its own life and vitality, yet you use chemical drugs to kill the ego that directs the body, and you also force your consciousness to witness the entire process of this ego being killed. This is a very terrifying thing. You simply do not need to do this; there is no need to encounter such a thing.

Seth says that this approach does indeed reveal the landscape of the psyche. Because without the ego's cover and packaging, your innermost, most primal parts are completely exposed.

In our ordinary lives in this world, all our dealings with the outside go through the garment of the ego. You can think of the ego as a shell, a garment, or a mask. We all have such an ego, and it is very natural and very adept at handling matters in this three-dimensional world. But at this moment, if you forcibly kill it and strip off your own outer garment, you stand completely naked before the psychologist who is supposedly treating you.

The psychologist gets to see the most primal things in your psyche. They believe that by doing so they can see the map of your psyche and then know where your problems lie. So this was caused by childhood trauma, and that was caused by such-and-such an event -- things that could not be discovered under the original cover of the ego. Now that the ego's garment has been stripped away, the problems of the psyche can be seen.

If this landscape of the psyche is hard for you to understand, then to explain it in material terms, it is somewhat like your cellular memory -- it is as if all the cellular memories of you from birth to death, up to the present moment, are all turned out and displayed, and then examined to see what influence these cellular memories have on you. You can understand it as a kind of map of the psyche, or a landscape of the psyche.

The psychoanalyst is very pleased, because at this moment, without the cover of your ego, your inner world is completely revealed. Psychologists especially like this -- you simply cannot hide anything, because your ego no longer exists, so what would you use to hide? There is nothing left to hide with.

But the experience the patient undergoes -- and these fully apply to those heavy-dose drugs -- represents, through a terrifying encounter, the process by which humanity is born into consciousness, as well as the death of that consciousness, a retreat into a state of destruction.

Then, as a patient struggles to re-emerge from dimensions that do not belong to those states, consciousness is reborn.

After undergoing this heavy-dose drug experience, the patient passes through a terrifying encounter -- an extremely horrifying encounter. What does this encounter represent? It represents the entire process of human consciousness from having no consciousness to the birth of consciousness. Simply put, it is from death and destruction, and then a new consciousness is born out of an unfamiliar dimension, and consciousness is reborn. And this rebirth is brought about through chemical substances.

You can imagine what kind of state this is. It is as if, after taking this drug, your existing self-cognition and your current personality are all destroyed, and then a brand-new one is born. And this birth takes place in that mad, terrifying state.

Let me give a simple example. It is like your normal birth taking place in a delivery room in a hospital, with the expectations of your parents and relatives, and with the help of doctors and nurses you are born normally. As soon as you are born, you receive good care. Whether from your family or the hospital, you actually come into this world in a state of grace, and your consciousness also enters in this state.

But what is the state under the influence of drugs? You come into this world in a state of terror. It is like being thrown into a scene resembling hell -- all around you are people who want to kill you, all devils and fierce beasts. You cannot imagine how terrifying it is. The flowers you see will eat you, ants will become as large as a building, and sunlight can kill people and scorch them to death. All kinds of terrifying things you cannot possibly imagine will occur. And it is in such a state that you give birth to a new consciousness. You can imagine what kind of feeling a consciousness born in such a state would have -- a state of terror.

The deepest biological and psychological structures have been altered.

Seth puts it very politely. He does not say they were damaged, nor that they were destroyed; he only says they were altered. But this word is very precise and also very merciful -- what was altered? The deepest biological and psychological structures. What is biological? It is your cells -- the memory of every one of your cells will change. The deepest physiological and psychological structures have already been altered because of taking this drug.

Although in some cases, consciousness may be attacked at its very foundations.

In such cases, the patient does have a period of transcendent feeling -- very pleasurable, transcending oneself, feeling greater and more capable than oneself. Because they represent, on the level of the psyche, a new personality being born from the old source. The old personality has already been killed, so you feel that you have transcended yourself and gained a completely new life, starting over. The old you has drifted away with the wind.

And this new personality is born out of the psychic death of the old personality.

At times, the genetic signals have been altered.

Not one hundred percent of the time, but very often your genetic signals have already been altered. You can imagine how great the impact on you is -- it alters your genetic signals, and the things in your cellular memory are all changed.

Seth here emphasizes forcefully:

This is a psychic slaughter carried out in an artificial manner.

Abusing this kind of high-dose hallucinogen is a slaughter of the psyche carried out in an artificial manner. Under the influence of LSD, a person is extremely susceptible to outside influence. If someone tells you that your ego must die, then you will kill it.

Even in the best of circumstances, you will unconsciously be swayed by the thoughts of the counselor. The psychotherapist stands beside you constantly giving you suggestions and guidance: your old things are not good; the reason you have depression is that your current ego is not good; the pain you have experienced is all because those memories are not good; let us first clear all of these away and start a new life.

This sounds very reasonable. But Seth tells you that this is causing a new psyche to be born after the slaughter of the old psyche.

This psychic rebirth brings with it a whole host of brand-new problems.

Scientists are thinking too naively. They think that by killing the old ego and giving birth to a new one, the old problems will all be solved -- depression cured, mania cured. But Seth says it brings a whole host of brand-new problems, and these brand-new problems arise out of the old problems, and they cannot yet be understood.

The new ego is quite aware of the circumstances of its birth. What is it aware of? It knows that it was born out of the death of the previous ego. Although at its birth it felt a great joy -- because the birth of a new consciousness naturally brings great joy -- apart from this joy, it will feel fear toward the sense of destruction from which it was born.

It looks back and sees that the corpse of the dead ego is still lying beside it. It was born standing upon the corpse of that dead ego. At this moment, this new ego will have a deep sense of fear. This fear is extremely, extremely deadly.

Why does it fear? Because this newly born ego saw the old ego being killed, so it thinks: perhaps at some point, I too will be killed. It lives constantly in fear or trembling. Of course it has the joy of new birth, but it also has an extremely deep fear.

The natural integrity of life is no longer the same. It can never trust the exterior world in the same way again.

It can never trust the exterior world in the same way again, because its relationship with the exterior world is no longer so stable. Why? Originally, from the day this ego was born, no one could threaten its existence. Without the aid of drugs, you yourself cannot kill this ego of yours. Once this small self exists, its connection with the exterior world, with your physical body, and with your own identity is already very close, and it has a self-protection mechanism. You cannot, through self-meditation or any other means, directly kill your own ego and replace it with a new one.

What is the benefit of not being able to do this? It is that your ego has a very powerful self-confidence and sense of self-security. It knows that it exists at all times, that it is always in charge, and that no one can threaten its existence.

But having just witnessed its predecessor being killed, will it still be so certain? It will not be certain. It will not be certain of its sense of security in this world. Therefore it can never trust the exterior world in the same way again.

The "self" that was born with the body earlier, and grew with the body, has departed. And another "self," rising from the previous organization, takes its place.

The ego consciousness that arose from the beginning of your life has already departed because of the drugs. The consciousness that accompanied your physical body day and night for decades has already departed, replaced by another self.

This is why some people in such a state cannot control themselves and cannot quit drugs. Many people feel that a drug addict seems like a completely different person. We often say "a drastic change in temperament" -- but it really is not simply a drastic change in temperament; the person really has become a different person. Because the old you no longer exists.

That is to say, the mother who wanted to help her daughter, the mother who was a doctor -- after she takes drugs, the mother who loved her daughter no longer exists; she has been killed by the drugs. Now you can understand the harm and the seriousness of drugs.

This is why the whole world abhors drugs and gives them no quarter and no excuse. For example, in Singapore, I believe possession of 5 grams or so of heroin is directly punishable by death⁴. No matter what nationality you are, if you enter Singapore and are found with a few grams of heroin on you, it is directly the death penalty. The same in mainland China: possession of more than a few grams of heroin, as I recall, is also directly the death penalty⁵. No matter who pleads for you, it is of no use.

This extreme method of handling it is precisely because the harm of drugs is too great, and it is irreversible.

Can it cure you? Seth has already told you here. The consciousness that accompanied you day and night for decades has already died. In other words, the "you" that you can call yourself -- "you" have already died. Your physical body is still alive, but that "you" has already died. You are left with only a shell, replaced by a new self, and you yourself are not even familiar with it, and you do not know where it came from.

If scientists still want to use this method to treat psychological illnesses, Seth really cannot sit still any longer; he must jump out and explain this matter in detail. If this kind of treatment were to become widespread, that would be too terrifying -- then it would not be treating illness; it would be a way of killing people. What it kills is not the life of the physical body; it kills your psyche, it kills the real you. The physical body seems still alive, but you are already like a walking corpse.

Natural Self-Change: The Creative Gift of the Psyche

Now, in the course of life's journey, such self-change is natural.

In our life's journey, we change ourselves on our own. We do not need to kill one self and then raise up a brand-new one; we change automatically, and the ego evolves and develops.

At any given time, in the process of its own adjustment, the self is different from what it was before.

In fact, at every moment, our thoughts, our ego, and our small-self consciousness are all changing. Seth says that this kind of spontaneous change is a creative gift of the psyche, an instinctive gift of ours, occurring at its own pace, happening naturally:

In ways not known to you, it is connected with the heart, the blood, the consciousness, and the cells.

It has a certain regularity and a certain rhythm, and it is related to our blood, psyche, and cells. But the entire structure and the incidental relationships have already changed -- it is the conscious mind that can digest and absorb what happens. Our external environment is changing, consciousness is changing, thoughts are changing, and these changes are all things we can accept. As consciousness changes, our body also changes, cells also change, blood also changes. This bodily change and conscious change complement each other, developing at their own pace and in ways not yet known to humanity.

In fact, we are constantly in this ongoing replacement of consciousness and replacement of the body, yet we are completely unaware of it -- we live and grow in this constant arising and passing away.

At this point, for emphasis, Seth leans forward:

Such heavy doses of LSD chemically activate all levels of cellular memory.

The key point is "all levels." It turns out all of your memories, so much so that cellular consciousness can no longer make decisions on its own. When you turn out a portion, that portion of consciousness can digest and absorb it, and another portion can continue to improve. But when everything is opened up all at once, when all the cellular memories from your birth to the present are turned out, your cells do not know what to do either.

Then, when the body and mind are under stress, these memories will suddenly burst forth. The intimate connection between the biological and the psychological has already been weakened.

The intimate connection between our body (the biological) and the psyche, the mind, has already been weakened, weakened to the point that we cannot control it. When all this cellular memory is turned out and then suddenly bursts forth, we do not know how to handle it; we have no place to start.

Therefore, only because you believe that the ego is a stepchild of the self do you spend so much effort trying to bring out inner knowledge.

What do you believe? You believe that the ego is not your own biological child; you do not trust it. That is why you spend so much effort trying to bring out inner knowledge. You want to dig things out from the inner self, because you think this consciousness cannot fully represent you, and you do not fully accept it. So Seth uses a metaphor: it is not your biological child.

That is why you desperately try to bring out inner knowledge, to bring out cellular memories. Because you feel that your consciousness is unreliable, and only cellular consciousness is reliable -- cellular memory is your biological child, while consciousness is not. You want to go find your biological child, so you want to turn out all the cellular memories.

Because a person does not understand the flexibility of his own consciousness, he agrees to undergo LSD therapy.

You do not understand that your consciousness is flexible. It is not a dead thing as scientists think -- consciousness is in a state of change, and it is flexible. You do not believe in its flexibility, so you use this drug, and you want to bring out all the inner things, bypassing the control of the ego, and directly read the data of cellular memory.

Therefore the patient and the therapist share a common belief: that the conscious mind cannot obtain the knowledge it needs.

The reason you are willing to take this hallucinogenic drug to treat your illness is that you want to anesthetize the ego and directly read the voice at the deepest level of your psyche. The premise is that both you and your psychologist do not trust the conscious mind; both feel that the conscious mind is unreliable, a big liar, and that it must be eliminated before the illness can be cured. It always gets in the way.

They also share other beliefs:

The inner self is a great repository of all that is repressed, fearful, and wild, and these things must be forced out before power and ability can be expressed in a positive, creative manner. Therefore they think they must first deal with all those past terrors and repressions before they can rid themselves of present fears.

They think that there are many repressed and terrifying things in the psyche, and these are the root cause of your present condition -- your present fears, your present illness, your present abnormal mental state are all caused by those things. The simplest way to cure the illness is to turn all those things out and clear them all away at once, and then you will have no more problems.

Actually, this is only another belief in which the patient and the healer operate.

The spontaneity of this healing process does indeed give the psychoanalyst and the psychologist a map of the psyche. Statistically speaking, although individual experiences differ, they naturally follow a pattern -- a psychological pattern:

After people consciously acknowledge this pattern of beliefs, they then react to it in an unconscious state.

What this means is that everyone's experiences are different, but we follow a common psychological pattern. Psychologists will give you many theories and patterns, saying that such-and-such things lead to such-and-such results, and such-and-such a person will make such-and-such a decision when facing such-and-such a situation. They think this is a belief pattern with universality, and that we humans react to this pattern in an unconscious state. In other words, they think that beneath the subconscious there is a standard pattern common to all humans, with a common reaction to most things, and that we are all influenced by this pattern.

Beneath this, one can glimpse symbolically a psychological landscape that, though distorted, is nevertheless definite. And these symbolic landscapes of the psyche are an attempt by consciousness to depict cellular memory.

In such circumstances, one can glimpse symbolically a psychological landscape that is already distorted but very definite and direct. Why definite? Because the cover of the ego is missing -- the ego has already been killed. But at this moment you are under the influence of drugs, not in a natural state, and your psyche is revealed under conditions of extreme terror, so the word "distorted" is used. And it is in a symbolic manner, so you cannot see it directly.

What is meant by a symbolic manner is that after taking the drug you will have all kinds of hallucinations. The doctor will ask you: what do you see right now? You say: I see a flower that eats people, with a gaping bloody mouth... This flower represents something or other from your childhood. Those are all symbols. In Seth Speaks we have discussed all of this -- the deeper levels of consciousness contain many symbols. He brings out these symbols and uses them to sketch your psychological map.

The activity of the psyche always excites the molecules of the cells.

Because this is the direct activity of the psyche. The molecules have an innate, freely flowing knowledge that builds up the knowledge of the cells.

This potential, naturally flowing knowledge of the molecules builds up the knowledge of the cells, and they cooperate seamlessly.

The cell molecules and the cells themselves cooperate seamlessly. But under the unnatural assault on the psyche triggered by heavy doses of LSD:

The comprehension of the molecules itself tries to burst apart, and this is not something your physical body perceives.

You can see how powerful this drug is. It directly enters the biological cells of the human body and affects the molecules within the cells. The result is that the comprehension of your molecules is about to burst apart. Then do the cells also burst apart? This bursting is not a physical bursting, but a bursting of cellular knowledge, a bursting of cellular memory. You can think of it as an explosion of information -- ordinarily cellular memory operates naturally, but at this moment an explosion of cellular memory occurs.

The integrity of the cells is threatened.

If the molecules within the cells have burst apart, then the integrity of the cells is certainly threatened.

Ruburt is quite correct in thinking that this is worse than any shock therapy.

Ruburt once said that this kind of LSD therapy is even more terrifying than electroshock, and this is correct. Electroshock already causes great harm to a person, altering many of the structures within the cells; this is even greater and more terrifying. The worst part is that there is simply no need for it -- there is no necessity to subject your cells to this threat that is even more terrifying than electroshock.

The Errors of Two Schools of Thought

All of these treatments are built upon one idea: that the conscious mind is powerless, that it cannot obtain knowledge from within you, so you must drive it away and eliminate it in order to obtain knowledge directly from within. Your premise is that the conscious mind does not know the deep problems, that it can only analyze and cannot handle those quite intuitive data.

But Seth says:

Actually, it is your beliefs that make it so powerless.

It is your belief that the conscious mind cannot handle that intuitive information. You think it cannot handle it, that it can only analyze objective, theoretical, rational things. As for intuitive things, you do not know what these inspirations and intuitions are bringing you, nor do you know how to process them.

It is not that the conscious mind lacks this ability; it is that your belief holds that it lacks this ability, and then it truly lacks this ability. This part was also discussed at length earlier in Chapter Nine -- when you think you cannot do something, you really cannot do it.

Attacking your consciousness in this manner challenges the stability of human consciousness and insults your identity as a human being.

When you use this kind of hallucinogenic drug, you are insulting your identity as a human being. Although Seth does not use foul language, is this sentence not extremely harsh? If you can understand it, you will know: all those who take hallucinogenic drugs or use narcotics, you are insulting the identity by which you exist as a human being. You do not even know the abilities that human beings possess, yet you resort to external things -- you are insulting the fact that you are human. Anyway, you know, Seth probably wanted to curse too, but he did not know how, so he used a rather refined way of cursing you.

You might say that this chemical substance is also natural -- because it was created by humans, and it is also composed of molecules and atoms from nature, so how is it not natural? If you think that everything existing in our world is natural, then you can also use this reason to deceive yourself into thinking that it is natural too.

But:

The body is naturally equipped to handle substances derived from the earth. Such heavy doses of artificial drugs are not easily absorbed and assimilated by the body, and they cause physiological disruption.

We are naturally equipped to handle substances derived from the earth. This is why ancient Chinese medicine is so excellent. Chinese medicine is very useful. Is not the method of Chinese medicine simply to prick you a couple of times with needles, scrape you a couple of times with hot stones, and only take medicine as a last resort? Chinese medicine does not start with medicine right away -- that came later. In the early stages, the principle was to avoid medicine if possible: if acupuncture could cure it, use acupuncture; if hot stones could cure it, use stones; if massage could cure it, use massage; only when none of these worked would medicine be used. And even then, the medicine came from nature, from the earth -- all things grown from the soil.

Anyone who disparages traditional Chinese medicine simply does not understand nature, does not understand human beings, and does not understand what this world is really about.

As for things that come from chemistry, we are simply not good at them by nature. Our bodies cannot absorb them or digest them, and they cause physiological disorder.

Some American Indians use peyote in their own way. But they do not overdo it, and it does not lead to excess, causing the conscious mind to be shocked and destroyed. They accept it as a natural ingredient of the land's structure. They do not want to destroy themselves, but use it to enhance their own natural gifts and perception.

That is called the hallucinogenic cactus. The Indians use it, but not to excess, and they do not let the conscious mind be shocked and destroyed. They do not want to destroy themselves, but to enhance their own natural gifts and perception, and to raise the ability of the inner senses.

They themselves did not die and become part of All That Is, as they should have done. They were able to digest the knowledge obtained from it, and purposefully apply this knowledge to their personal lives and social structures.

They themselves did not die, and did not kill the conscious mind. Through taking this hallucinogenic cactus, they realized that they are part of All That Is -- each of us is originally like this. With the help of the conscious mind, they could digest the knowledge obtained from it. What does "it" mean? It means this sense of oneness, of being one with All That Is. When they recognized that they are part of All That Is, they could obtain a great deal of knowledge from it, and then purposefully apply it to personal growth and to the development of human society as a whole.

They used peyote within their belief system, in which they understood their own biological instincts and took them for granted. The conscious mind was considered a supplement to the biological attributes of human beings, not a diminishment.

They had a most basic understanding of their own bodies and their own instincts, and they believed that the human conscious mind is a supplement to human beings, not a diminishment. The conscious mind is good for us human beings, so why would you want to kill it?

As mentioned earlier, there are two schools of thought popular today:

The first is the belief that the conscious mind and reason possess all the answers.

The first school believes that when the conscious mind combines with our logical thinking ability and our capacity for rational analysis, it knows all the answers. But for this school, the conscious mind mainly plays an analytical role, and they find all the answers through reason alone. They also do not believe that the answers come from the inner self within; they think that as long as the conscious mind participates in analysis, that is enough.

The other school believes that the answers lie in feelings and emotions. But both are wrong.

Be sure to remember, both of these views are wrong.

Reason and emotion together create your existence.

Your feelings and your reason together create your present existence. Be sure to remember here that it is together.

What is their biggest mistake?

Their biggest mistake is believing that perception's important function must be analytical, rather than understanding and digesting "the intuitive mind and knowledge."

In other words, the important function of perception is analysis, and our most important function is analytical; rather than using our perception to face things intuitively, and to understand and digest the intuitive mind and intuitive knowledge.

One side only acknowledges the role of reason, while the other side only acknowledges the role of feeling -- the role of emotion and mood. Neither is right. Neither school understands the natural flexibility and possibility of the conscious mind:

Humanity has only just begun to use its potential.

We do not understand that the conscious mind itself can obtain the most direct perception from within, and that it also has the ability to understand and digest this intuition and inspiration. We think the conscious mind is only helpful for this kind of rational analysis, which is equivalent to not understanding its flexibility and possibility.

The conscious mind can not only understand the outer material world externally, but can also understand the information coming directly from the inner self internally, and it can handle it very well. As long as you believe it, trust it, and give it this ability, it can handle it extremely well. Combining these two together is the complete expression of our most basic ability as human beings. If you overemphasize either side, you are wrong.

Epilogue

Seth said now let us talk about the cat material -- because the cat at their house had died a while ago. He said it is too late now, so you should not talk about this matter anymore; we will get to this matter.

At this time the editor at the publishing house was calling Jane again. This book was going to be published, and they wanted to sign a contract with her. The manuscript was tentatively set for October, and Seth said do not worry about the time issue. Because after reading the first six chapters, the editor decided to sign the publishing contract with them for The Nature of Personal Reality. Seth said, if you are worried about not finishing the writing in time, then we can change from two sessions a week to three sessions a week. Rob said the publisher had set October as the deadline for the manuscript, and then Seth made a joke:

"Besides typing, I can also do other things."

After that was Jane's description of her own exuberance. That is all for this session's commentary. I wish everyone a wonderful day.

Introduction

Today I will continue with the second part of the commentary on Chapter 10 of the Seth book The Nature of Personal Reality, that is, Session 639, the session held on Monday evening, February 12, 1973. I will not repeat the earlier introductory material, which covered the title content of this second part and the title content of Chapter 10. Let us go directly to the main text.

Your Body Is You in the Flesh

It says, your body is your soul as you in the flesh.

Your body is you in the flesh.

What this sentence means is that your body is the expression of your soul in the flesh. As I have mentioned in other books, at any particular "time" -- here "time" is in quotation marks, because they have no concept of time, so let us use Earth time to speak of it -- at any particular time, the soul cannot fully affirm itself through bodily experience. Therefore there is always a part of you that is unexpressed, unmanifested.

That is to say, you are a being that has both physical expression and nonphysical expression, a multidimensional being. But in the physical aspect, only a part of you is expressed, and there is another part of you that cannot be expressed in the physical world. Of course, all of your actual experience must be centered in the body, and the energy that animates your body comes from the soul.

Session 639

Through your own thoughts, you direct the expression of the body, and that expression can be healthy or diseased.

That is to say, your thoughts determine whether your body is healthy or diseased.

Out of an understanding of the contents of your own conscious interior, you affirm that you can heal most of the body's illnesses.

When you have an understanding of the contents of the conscious mind, then you can affirm that you are able to heal most of the body's illnesses—he did not say all, he said most.

Your ideas themselves follow certain creative laws and have their own rhythms. The mind's associations, operating through the brain, are connected with the fine, subtle behavior within your cells. When you learn to use your thoughts, or when a change in thought occurs, then a corresponding change takes place within your cells.

There is an orderly process and a close relationship. What this passage says is very simple: a change in your thoughts will directly bring about a change in the cells of your body. This is real. So that is why some people become ill, why some people have emotional knots or cannot let things go—if you cannot let things go over a long period, why some people get cancer, this is the reason—your thoughts will change your body, this is stated very clearly. But this process is an orderly process and a close relationship.

Drugs and the Man-Made Disaster Area of the Psyche

When you use a heavy dose of LSD, you artificially create a disaster area, hoping to rescue from it an efficient, useful self.

You want to rescue from this disaster area a highly efficient and very useful self.

True, the old interaction between an associative thought pattern and its habitual action may be broken, but at the same time the structure with its inner regularity is genuinely shocked, both psychically and physiologically.

Seth's wording is very tactful. He uses the word "shocked," not words like destroyed or damaged. In other words, ordinarily we have an associative mode of thinking. Our ordinary thinking is associative -- this is important -- along with its habitual action. Our associative mode of thinking has its own habitual action. In this habitual mode of thinking and ordinary conscious activity, you directly break them; the interaction between them is broken, and at the same time that inner regular structure is genuinely shocked. He puts it very tactfully, but in fact it has suffered a certain degree of damage.

The Healing Function of Nightmares

There is a considerable amount of natural therapy that goes on in ordinary daily life, and much of it takes place in the dream state.

In our ordinary lives, there are many times when we are dreaming and have very terrifying nightmares, and we wake up startled in the middle of the dream.

The conscious mind of the person is then forced to face that kind of heightened, excited condition.

That is, in the dream there is something terrifying — for example, dreaming of war, dreaming of someone chasing you, dreaming of some especially urgent situation appearing, or even someone being killed in the dream, and so on. This kind of urgent situation is extremely frightening; any kind of situation is possible.

In the process of later recollection, however, the nightmare itself can be compared to one part of the self administering shock therapy to another part of the self.

When we think back on this nightmare afterwards, we can understand it as one part of the self administering shock therapy to another part of the self.

In it, cellular memories are triggered, much as happens in LSD experiments.

In this nightmare, cellular memories are triggered, much like what happens in LSD experiences — that is, some bizarre, utterly unconnected, or not at all logical terrifying things happen to oneself, making you wake up with a start, breaking out in a cold sweat all over, your heart racing and pounding wildly, and that feeling of fear is especially horrible. So how does this come about? How can you have this kind of physical reaction in a dream? It says this is caused by awakening your cellular memories, by triggering your cellular memories.

But you yourself are its best therapist.

You yourself are the best therapist. You yourself know how much shock your own psyche can withstand — that is, your nightmares, what kind of nightmares you can endure — and you benefit from its power, gaining benefit from within it.

It knows through such intense experience and imagery, the winding plot and imagery of the dream, which associations to activate, and which not to touch.

The way human consciousness thinks, or the human way, is through the associative mode of thinking mentioned earlier and its habitual actions — this is the normal way human consciousness thinks, and the two interact with each other. So when you are dreaming, this nightmare-like thing can stimulate certain associations in you, but these associations are selective. It is choosing which associations in you to activate, and then letting them touch upon other related associations, producing a certain therapeutic effect on you. It is somewhat like a mental patient receiving shock therapy in a mental hospital — giving oneself a strong stimulus, giving oneself a strong stimulus from the outside.

A series of nightmares is often a self-regulating shock therapy that may startle the conscious mind itself, but nevertheless when people wake up in the normal world, although still shaken, they live safely through that day.

Some people have not just one nightmare, but a whole series of them. It is a self-regulating shock therapy. When we wake up, although we are still very frightened inside and that feeling of terror is still there, no matter what, you are still living normally. After you wake up from the dream, you have merely been given a big fright. Although this kind of shock therapy is quite frequent for yourself, it does not cause any real physical harm to your body; it is only carrying out treatment and healing for you.

Other dream events, though forgotten, also serve as aids to this nightmare therapy, helping it achieve its effect. Just as some LSD therapy finally gives the person, gives the patient, a feeling of rebirth, though often only temporarily.

This is a method of treatment. Some events you have forgotten, but the feeling of terror is still there, and this assistance achieves its effect. A person who takes this kind of drug, LSD, will also obtain a feeling of rebirth — because the former self has already been killed, and a new self is born, so he has a feeling of rebirth.

A period of such nightmares, quite naturally, will also quite naturally lead to a kind of dream in which the self establishes a greater connection with the source of its own being.

If there is a period of continuous nightmares of this kind, within the series of nightmares, it will bring about another kind of dream. In this dream, he himself establishes a new and greater connection with his own entity, and from a certain angle he similarly obtains a kind of rebirth.

If scientists studied the body's and the mind's natural healing abilities, they could learn how to encourage these abilities. And such processes — and I have mentioned only one of them — are continuous throughout their lifetime.

Throughout our lives, we are continuously carrying out healing on ourselves. Having nightmares like this is only one of the methods; human beings have many methods of self-healing.

The Conscious Mind Under the Influence of Drugs

When large doses of chemical drugs are used, the conscious mind is forced to confront experiences of tremendous, shocking power head-on, and that is not what it was meant to handle.

What happens when you use large amounts of drugs? Your conscious mind is forced to come face to face with experiences of extremely shocking power. It directly digs up all the things that were originally hidden away in your cellular memory, and all sorts of symbolic things that you had never experienced before also come bubbling up.

Such experiences force it to feel powerless.

This kind of experience makes it feel helpless, unable to cope, because these events simply cannot be processed. Many people ask, what kind of events? How could I encounter things I have never experienced that I cannot handle? That is because you are a normal person; you have never taken this kind of psychedelic drug or experienced that kind of scene.

When facing the external nightmare of war and natural disasters, the conscious mind is still directed toward the outer world. It knows that it was formed precisely to deal with this situation.

When we are truly facing war, or facing natural disasters, the conscious mind consciously knows that it can handle this situation, because it knows that these things were also formed by itself. When under great actual pressure, the conscious mind draws upon the strength of the body and the inner self, and performs quite admirable feats of heroism. Afterwards it is amazed at its own strength and energy in the crisis.

Its own stability and awareness can be greatly deepened and strengthened.

After going through a series of heroic feats, its own stability and awareness can be greatly deepened and strengthened—this refers to the conscious mind. When a person faces a natural world that seems fraught with danger, he may discover that his ability to get along with others surprises even himself.

But in treatment with heavy doses of LSD, in the artificially induced psychic disaster area, consciousness finds itself in a state of crisis, and that crisis is not caused by the outside world. Consciousness is forced to fight on a battlefield, and it was never designed for that kind of war.

What came before refers to natural disaster areas—for example, the scene of an earthquake, or a state of war. But under the stimulation of drugs, the situation of an artificially induced psychic disaster area is exactly the opposite. Opposite in what way? The crisis is not external, not an outer battlefield; it is fighting on a battlefield of consciousness. The conscious mind can handle external warfare, natural disasters, and actual war, but it cannot handle that kind of internal warfare, nor can it understand it.

The associations, memories, and organization that consciousness regards as its allies, along with all the forces of the inner self, suddenly all turn into enemies.

The associations, memories, and organization that our consciousness often regards as its allies—these are the allies and good helpers of our consciousness. But in this kind of psychic disaster area, associations will make it associate with extremely terrifying things; it is afraid to even make associations, it does not dare to think. As for memory, it does not even know what it might dredge up; some things have certainly long been buried in the deepest recesses of memory, and now at this moment they are all mobilized, and intensified in an explosive way. Originally you could handle a very terrifying thing, but after taking the drug, the atoms and molecules in your cells will all produce explosions, and the stimulation of these explosions is like multiplying the intensity of your cellular memory by who knows how many times. Under this increased intensity, your previous fears will multiply exponentially, and that is not something an ordinary person can endure. At this time, associations and memory and organization—including organizing terrifying things together—are what you hate the most. At that moment you desperately want your brain to stop, but it simply cannot stop. These associations, memories, and organization all become your enemies. And all these inner forces of yours, all those things of your inner self, all the things in your cellular memory—they all become your enemies.

The conscious mind was originally meant to design and lead these forces, and now it cannot withstand them. At the same time it is stripped of its innate logical ability, because it is stripped of its sense of identity. Certainly there is nothing external for it to resist, no framework in which it can find balance.

The conscious mind itself has the ability for logical reasoning, and at this time it is stripped of that too, because the ego is completely wiped out, and it is stripped of its sense of identity. Previously it could tell itself through logical analysis that these things are all fake, all just dreams, all unreal, and so on; but at this time there are no such external logical abilities, no sense of identity. Your psyche is directly exposed to the most terrifying things, and you are not even allowed to have the ability to think logically. You can imagine whether your psyche could endure this kind of situation.

Ruburt's Double World

Ruburt has been writing a book of poems called Dialogues, and in it he recently spoke of a double world. One evening he stood by the kitchen window, and without having taken any drugs whatsoever, he saw a rain puddle below suddenly turn into a living, beautiful, liquid creature. It stood up and walked, and the rainwater slid down from its liquid edges.

Here he gives an example and weaves it into this content. That is, on a rainy evening, Ruburt was by the window, and directly within his visual system he saw a puddle suddenly turn into a liquid creature. It is like that movie we have seen called The Terminator, where the liquid robot cannot be killed and can regenerate at any time — something like that — the puddle turned into a liquid creature, and it could even stand up and walk.

As he watched this reality in stillness, his heart was filled with joy.

At this time he was filled with joy. He knew that in the physical world a puddle is flat, and it was only then that his logic and cognitive abilities came into play. He saw another equally concrete reality, and he himself knew that I am perceiving another world besides the physical world, so he called it Dialogues. In fact, the world of this reality that he perceived is a larger reality. And the rain spirit — suppose that rain has a soul, or that rain has a spirit — then the rain spirit lives within this. In such a reality, the rainwater in the puddle gathers together, and it has already manifested something spiritual, and has already become a creature.

For a while he saw the double world with his physical eyes.

He saw it with his physical eyes.

If his conscious mind had not clearly understood that experience, then although the experience was exciting, it would also have become a nightmare.

If your conscious mind is not clear that you are experiencing another kind of reality, then what will you do at this time? You will be scared to death. You cannot distinguish the feeling between the reality of this double world and your present world, and you cannot even tell what is real and what is reality anymore.

If he had gone outside and found that living creatures were rising up from every rain puddle, and if he had tried with all his might but still could not turn these creatures back again, then the experience would have become a nightmare.

In this present state, he knows that this is another reality, so for him this is a beneficial experience. He knows what he is doing, and he knows what he is seeing. If at this time he did not have this judgment of the conscious mind, and he did not know what he was seeing — for example, if he went outside and saw that the things in the puddles really had turned into monsters rising up one after another, then it would have become a nightmare for him.

But when the conscious mind is forced to face encounters that are far from being so pleasant, and is at the same time deprived of its reasoning ability, then you have indeed insulted the very basis of its existence.

That is to say, under the influence of drugs, to face things that are far from being so pleasant, and at the same time to be deprived of the ability to reason — then he encountered that. And moreover, if these liquid creatures were to turn around and attack him, then his feeling would not be so comfortable anymore, and there would no longer be a sense of benefit and joy.

Ruburt's Yellow Light Experience

Not long after Ruburt's rain-spirit experience, there was another experience. In the waking state, he saw a round, soft yellow light suddenly appear before his eyes. He saw it very clearly and concretely, yet could not find its source. This lasted for a few seconds and then disappeared.

The moment Ruburt saw that yellow light, he jumped back, startled—where did this come from? He had just finished writing the last line of a poem before dinner, and it happened to be a line about a light that could illuminate two worlds—which two worlds? The worlds of the soul and the body. And then he saw just such a yellow, soft ball of light in the kitchen.

Consciously, he thought the light must have been caused by lightning.

Even though at the same time another part of him knew otherwise, another part of him clearly knew this was not the case, because this light was different from the steady ball of light caused by lightning. After a while he remembered his line of poetry and made the proper connection between the two—only then did he realize, so I saw this light because I had written such a line in my poem.

The conscious mind was momentarily disturbed by the source of the light, but it digested the information. The meaning of the light will become clearer through Ruburt's dreams, for those dreams are the intuitive extension of the poem and the actual example.

The reason Ruburt saw this light was that while writing the poem he had an image in his mind, and such an image would produce this light for him in reality. The meaning represented by that light would unfold normally when he was ready to perceive it fully. He wished for a light that could illuminate the soul and the material world—he wrote that in his poem—and when he was ready, the light showed itself to him.

Therefore, although the event has occurred, like anything else it is not finished.

It happened, but it was not finished.

Experience Forced Upon Consciousness

In the drug experiences mentioned earlier, frightening and unnatural symbols and events are suddenly forced upon the conscious mind. What is more, this happens at a time that no longer holds meaning for the conscious mind. The conscious mind cannot subjectively contemplate those images, simply because the phenomena occur too quickly.

This kind of thing happened to Ruburt, and he is fine now. But if it happens to someone who has taken drugs — for example, seeing a puddle turn into a monster, and then a light suddenly appearing in front of them — under normal circumstances the conscious mind's capacity for logical reasoning has already been knocked out by the drug. And when these things are forced upon their perceptual system, and they are changing at a rapid pace, the person cannot take it. It is like a nightmare.

Among the phenomena that occur, there may be a distorted and bizarre period of time, during which action seems impossible, because no clear distinction is allowed between yourself and the experience. Even a pleasant experience, if it is forced upon consciousness, becomes an assault on consciousness, and for the whole personality, the price paid is too high.

After you take drugs, you will go through a distorted and bizarre period of time. During this period, all those experiences are forced upon your consciousness. Without giving you any process of thinking and analyzing, the feelings are just shoved at you directly. In this situation, even if it is a pleasant experience, if it is forced upon your consciousness, you will not feel comfortable either. You will feel that your consciousness is under attack, and for the whole personality, the price you pay is too high.

If you cannot understand this passage, let me give a more down-to-earth example. What does "forced" mean? A feeling is forced upon you. If it is pleasurable, but it is forced upon your consciousness, your first feeling will absolutely be extreme revulsion and discomfort. A simple example: making love is a pleasurable thing for everyone, but if it happens under coercion, no one would feel comfortable. That revulsion and psychological trauma cannot be described. So why is rape punished as a serious crime? That is the reason. If it did not cause such deep and severe psychological trauma, then why would it be punished as a serious crime? The core of it is that it forces the other person's will. When the other person's will is not prepared at all, or does not want it at all, something that might normally be pleasurable is forced upon them — but when someone forces it upon you, it is no longer pleasurable. You can try it. Ask a man how it feels if a woman forces him to have sex with her — when he does not want to. For example, when a man is playing video games, when he is watching a ball game, and at that moment his girlfriend might want to do something intimate with him, he would be quite averse to it — let alone if it were a complete stranger. That is normal. So this has nothing to do with whether you are male or female.

Another example: you are already full and someone keeps feeding you. Or even if you are not full, you simply do not want to eat right now — you are focused on doing something else — and suddenly someone pries your mouth open and stuffs a bunch of food into it. I am giving you a simple, crude example like this so you can understand it.

So what Seth means is that after you take drugs, your consciousness is completely wide open. Whatever others pour into you, you have to accept it. And what is poured into you is bizarre and dazzling — all kinds of things, all kinds of terrifying and horrible things, everything gets poured in. Never mind pleasurable things — his point is that even if pleasurable things were given to you at that moment, you would not feel comfortable, because your consciousness feels attacked. Your consciousness has been violated. It has absolutely no ability to fight back, and no ability to counterattack. Because between your feelings and your consciousness there is no space at all, no dividing line — it is just poured directly into you.

The Illusion of Rebirth and the Basis of Suicide

So in the experiences that follow, there is often a feeling of, say, rebirth. And in fact this is truly the case. The old organization of the self has already been shed, and the new psychic structures genuinely feel joy because of their unity and vitality.

The old organization you had before has already been shed, and the new psychic structures—because they are completely newly regenerated—are themselves unified, and their unity and vitality make the new organization itself feel very happy, so there is a joy of rebirth. This is why people who take drugs have a period at the beginning when they feel especially elated, a state that is like having regained life itself.

From here a powerful basis for suicide is often provided.

In this state a basis for suicide is provided. Clearly it recognizes that the old fellow did not manage to survive—the old fellow refers to that original self, that original consciousness, which did not survive. So then how can the so-called new self be guaranteed? This produces the basis for suicide in the new consciousness—because suicide here refers to this consciousness, not physical suicide, but the suicide of that consciousness. Because it discovers that the old consciousness was killed off, so how can this newly generated consciousness guarantee how long it can live? Then the next time I take the drug again, won't this new consciousness also become the old consciousness, and be directly killed off again by the sensory stimulation and chemical reactions in the process of the next dose? Its conscious mind remains forever in this state of dread.

The Body Is a Living Statue

Again, the body is a living statue. You form it within it. In fact, when you have a physical body, it is you.

The title of this part is exactly this: the body is a living statue. You form it within it. In fact, when you have a physical body, it is you. You must identify with your physical body, otherwise you will feel alienated from your biological identity. Saying it back and forth, it is still the same statement: you cannot use drugs to eliminate the physical senses you dislike, or the self-consciousness on the physical or conscious level. Your physical body is a part of you, and also a part of your soul. It is a part of you, and you cannot despise it. Despising it is despising your own essence.

Now in your terms, all expression must be through the physical body.

For us human beings, all our expression must be expressed through the physical body. But you do not live only in this earthly world. Your identity as a biological being must rely on the physical body, and when your physical body dies you will still exist. But in fact you must always operate through an image -- after the physical body dies you still have another spiritual body image, and you still need an image. Your physical body is merely a physical image. What he means is that you will always need an image. You cannot say that you do not like this image of yours, or that you do not accept it. That will not work.

If you identify only with the physical body, then you may feel that life after death is impossible. If you think of yourself only as a mental body, your physical body will not feel vital, and you will be separated from it.

If you think of yourself as a spiritual body, you think the physical body is just a vehicle, and your soul is only temporarily dwelling in this physical body. This physical body itself has no vitality, and all your vitality lies in the mental and spiritual level.

Now think of yourself as a physical creature, and know that later you will still operate through another form, but the body and the material world are your present mode of expression.

Now you think of yourself as a material creature, a physical creature, but you must know that later you will operate through another form. But right now, in the present, the body and the material world are your mode of expression -- the material world, that is, the world that appears externally to you, and your body, are an external manifestation of what makes you you.

This attitude is very important.

This acceptance of your own physical body is very important.

In an intense drug experience, you take the body's expression out of its natural context, so that its usual reactions lose their meaning. It is as if a world collapsed upon you, and you could have no proper defense or retaliation.

In an intense drug experience, you take the body's expression out of its natural context -- you pull it out of the material world context in which it occurs, and place it into a material reality it is not familiar with at all, or into a non-material reality it is not familiar with at all. Your physical body's experience is clearly designed for you to experience and live in the three-dimensional world, yet you insist on dragging this physical body experience into a state brought about by so-called drug use. At that point, neither your body nor your consciousness can bear it. Because your body was manufactured and designed to handle this three-dimensional world; it is not meant for you to handle that higher-dimensional spiritual world -- that world requires you to adapt to it after you no longer have a physical body, not now.

Moreover, under the influence of drugs, it is not the state reached naturally through meditation or through one's own practice. It is the state you are pushed into through externally borrowed drug use, and then you cannot bear it. All the attacks on your consciousness, all the things happening are attacking you, and you have no defensive ability against these attacks -- this defensive ability is not physical defense, but the defense of your psyche, the defense of your consciousness. None of it can exist.

It is as if you were tied up in one place like a lamb waiting to be slaughtered. You have absolutely no control over how others treat you. Whether others beat you, curse you, stab you with a knife, kill you, insult you, rape you, molest you -- you have no way to resist at all. This resistance is not only physical resistance; you cannot even resist mentally. Can you imagine what a person would become in this state? Just thinking about it, do you not find it terrifying? Yet after you take drugs, this is exactly the feeling. The so-called brief rebirth you gain is only temporary, and what comes after brings exactly this feeling. The example Seth gives is extremely terrifying -- it is as if the whole world collapsed upon you, but you could have no proper defense or retaliation. You can neither fight back nor defend yourself. I doubt anyone could bear the feeling of the whole world collapsing upon them.

A psychoanalyst might say, go along with this experience, go down with it, and if necessary, then be destroyed.

That is to say, go down with this drug-induced state. No matter what bizarre things you encounter, just go down with it. If the result of going down with it is destroying yourself, then let yourself be destroyed -- destroy the old you, and only then can a new you be born, and only then can your illness be cured.

But to say this is to directly conflict with your biological instincts and the common sense of the conscious mind.

Your biological instinct does not want to die, and the common sense of your conscious mind is not like that either. You cannot disarm the conscious mind, leaving it unable to have any ability to resist or think logically. This in itself is a direct conflict. The conscious mind was designed to handle your survival in this three-dimensional world and to ensure your own existence. Now you tell it, I want to destroy you, and you cannot resist -- then that in itself is a conflict. Whether from biological instinct or from the conscious mind, it is a direct conflict.

He said, I am well aware that I am making a distorted religious connection here. He said, die to yourself and you will be reborn.

He made a distorted, religious connection. I am not sure how to put it here -- a kind of sarcasm, I suppose. Die to yourself and you will gain rebirth -- kill yourself and gain rebirth. Does that not sound ridiculous? Many people who commit suicide have this idea. Some of them commit suicide to escape this society and this world, and some do it because they want to gain rebirth.

You will not kill yourself. The self as you know it is constantly dying and being reborn, like the cells within the body.

You cannot kill yourself. Do you think it is that easy to kill yourself? The self as you think of it is constantly dying and being reborn -- you cannot kill yourself. You are in the midst of birth and death, dying and returning, just like the cells within your body. Cells die and are born, live and die, but you are eternal.

Physically and mentally, new life depends upon these countless changes and transformations.

Physically and mentally, your new life depends upon these countless changes and transformations.

The Graceful Dance of All Living Beings

Physiologically and spiritually, new life depends upon these countless changes and transformations. In the seasons of the earth and the seasons of the psyche, birth and death occur naturally — the seasons of the earth are the long river of time, while the seasons of the psyche transcend time, in higher dimensional space. In both of these worlds, your spirit and your life pass through countless changes and transformations in this way, and all of these occur naturally.

The graceful dance of all living beings is reflected in the universe of the body and the mind.

This is Seth using poetic language to describe it. All living beings carry an inherently graceful dance, dancing gracefully in the universe of the body and the mind, and we should dance along with it, rather than nailing ourselves to a cross, letting ourselves be burned, or subjected to interrogation.

It is always because you do not trust the natural self that you resort to this kind of drug-based treatment. Why do you seek outside and take psychedelics or drugs? Because you do not believe you can solve your problems, you do not believe you can get better, so you always want to try things from outside.

Those who seek healing are afraid of the nature of their own being, and thus are quite willing to sacrifice it.

They are afraid of the nature of their own being, so they are willing to sacrifice it.

There is no magical cure, only an understanding of your own great creativity and an understanding that you create your own world.

This comes back to the same point: your beliefs create your world. If you want yourself not to be ill, you can use your beliefs to decide that you will not be ill. There is no need for you to seek outside and treat yourself through medication.

The Soul Wears a Chemical Garment

In practical life, the soul is clothed in a chemical garment -- be sure to remember this sentence. What it means is that the soul is something we cannot perceive in the three-dimensional world, but it wears a chemical garment. In other words, through the adjustment of certain chemical substances, you can indeed alter your soul's perception, making you feel as though you have touched the soul, but what you actually touch is only a garment of the soul. For example, dimethyltryptamine, DMT, and other such substances⁶, including the ingredients of some psychedelic drugs, themselves make you feel as though you have touched the soul, when in fact you have only touched a chemical garment of the soul.

The ingredients you take into your body create an image that suits your beliefs.

Some beliefs undoubtedly come from your culture, while others are a private interpretation of the self within your physical body.

Your belief about any chemical ingredient will affect the influence it has upon you.

That is to say, how you regard this chemical psychedelic will in turn affect what influence it produces on you.

When doing LSD therapy, you expect a drastic reaction. When you take it, you expect such a reaction, because your doctor will tell you what kind of reaction to expect, and you are told to be prepared.

When you are told to be prepared, your experience is altered by the therapist's spoken and unspoken beliefs -- he says he is going to give you this drug, tells you the drug will have a drastic reaction, some of it perhaps spoken and some unspoken, and by then you have already been influenced by it.

Yet if you believe that a chemical ingredient in some food will do you great harm and bring about dire consequences, then even a tiny dose can injure you.

This is what often happens when we eat things and say this has pesticide residue, that has heavy metal residue, and so on. Once these things are instilled in you and form your beliefs, they really can cause serious consequences for your body. The same is true of LSD -- it is a belief shared by everyone, and it will affect you.

Jane's Experience of Rain and Light

All right, Seth said to take a break here. At this point Jane began to recall a report of an experience she had in rain and light. I will go through it quickly; there is nothing much to explain here. Jane's narrative and poetry supplement what Seth said, and they show how she became consciously aware of the unique transformation by which her originally poetic idea turned into a visual reality -- originally just a poetic idea, which in the end became a visual reality. It also shows how she pushed this creative process a step further by turning the new perception into more lines of verse. We believe that in any field of life, this kind of seepage between realities is very common, although in most cases it happens automatically. In art, we usually call this inspiration. Originally you have a poetic image, and then it turns into a visual imagining -- many people who write poetry, or the ancient poets, would know this: when they saw a willow tree they imagined it as someone, and when they saw peach blossoms they saw someone else. This kind of seepage really can occur. For example, if you suddenly see a branch of peach blossoms as if it had turned into a beautiful woman, at that moment you have inspiration.

The following is what Jane said. She had been writing poetry all day, for a collection called The Soul and the Mortal Self -- Dialogues in Time, which Seth shortened to Dialogues. She was writing rapidly in a state of inspired flow, and just before dinner she wrote about the single yet double universe of her own soul. The last line was spoken by the mortal self:

Let us travel through two worlds at once with double vision, and form a single yet double song. This song splashes out ripples of thought and blood, it swirls, crinkles, and awakens, across our single universe. The double sky shatters into vowels of rainbow, singing a soft lullaby, falling like light in our two worlds.

Remember that last line: a soft lullaby falling like light in our two worlds.

Let us continue. After dinner Rob went out to buy groceries. It was already dark, and the rain was falling heavily, with silent flashes of lightning crossing the sky. For February weather, it was quite warm. She considered whether to go out for a walk, but then gave up the idea. After experiencing the two experiences concerning rain and light that Seth described at this point, she immediately added this passage to Dialogues. This is the poet's inspiration and creation -- she had earlier written about a double world, and also about falling like light, and then she saw the puddle turn into a liquid creature. Was that not a concrete manifestation of the double world? Then she thought of falling like light, and a light really did appear before her. After these two experiences, she turned them into new lines of verse and added them to the original Dialogues. A little later the mortal self said:

The light flashed past. What did it touch? Was it real? At this moment I stand by the open kitchen window, looking again at the rain-wet street, only now the sky has darkened. I have been writing all day, and I have finished the work that needed to be done. Guests will arrive soon, so my mind is blank. Yet I am drawn, transfixed. The raindrops fall as thousands of separate luminous points, gathering far below into a puddle. Under my gaze, the puddle slowly rises, thickens, becomes a spiny film, like a lung filled with air, like a hedgehog-shaped mass of light. And raindrops are born both inside and outside it. It fades into the reflection of passing headlights, and the lights rush blindly into its body, until it overflows and throbs. A shining, flowing creature, with rain sliding off its smooth liquid skin. And there stands a being so mutable, every part of it alive and moving, sliding, shimmering. I close my eyes, and I open them almost immediately. The creature flattens back down, becomes a puddle again, but is just about to begin rising once more.

As everything I saw passed through my soul, our worlds met, and I cried out. Just as I was crying out:

A soft ring of light suddenly appeared, right in front of me, clearly defined, between the refrigerator and the stove. I was startled and jumped back. A circle of soft glowing light hung in the air, from my waist up to above my head. Not a ball of fire, but a quiet, round, motionless light. No light spread from its edges, so the rest of the room remained dark. It was lightning, of course, but no flash jumped from the refrigerator or the stove, and no source for this light could be found indoors or outdoors. It hung in the air, like a flat sunflower that had suddenly appeared, surrealistically large, without leaves or stem. An omen -- the one you spoke of, the light that would unite our double single world, emerging from your universe into mine. Whatever its cause or origin, I felt it must have a reason for appearing, and I very much wanted to know what that reason was. I knew the puddle was natural, that in this world it was flat, and at the same time with another kind of vision I saw its other aspect, rising and glittering, almost stepping forward. But if that light came from the world I know, I must admit I do not know how it came. But dear soul, I am afraid I cannot wait for your answer now. I hear the guests arriving, and I am happy just to sit and chat idly, on this stormy night, as the wind carries the rain past.

This is the poem Jane added after she saw the puddle turn into a creature, and then saw a pale yellow light suddenly appear in the kitchen. So this is a true depiction of a poet's creative process. Jane wrote it out, but we can imagine how other painters and musicians have no idea where their compositions come from. For example, when I was reading Zhu Guangqian's On Beauty⁷, in chapters fourteen and fifteen it mentions a French composer who, when setting a poem to music, could not figure out how to compose the last line⁸, and could not find a suitable melody. Two years later he went to Rome on a trip, and accidentally fell into a river. After people pulled him out, you know what? He was humming a melody over and over -- and that melody was exactly the music for the last line of that poem. He added this melody to the piece, and the piece became absolutely perfect. So where that melody came from, he did not know either.

Another example: the author of The Sorrows of Young Werther said himself that he did not know how that novel came to be. One day, when he saw a news report about a young man's suicide -- he only saw such a news report, without seeing any actual scene -- his inspiration suddenly came, and he himself said it was like a light illuminating my consciousness. Then the entire plot of the novel and the whole structure of the writing all came out at once, and he wrote the entire novel in one burst, in only two weeks. After he finished and looked back at The Sorrows of Young Werther, he could not believe he had written it himself, and felt as if it had come from somewhere unknown.⁹

I am only giving these examples to show that Jane revealed her artistic creative process to us, and then Seth added understanding and interpretation. What she actually wanted to tell you is that this kind of soul-level creation is a double process, each side promoting the other.

But in the life of that puddle, I saw two realities, one surreal and one actual. She said, I think I can move back and forth between the two realities at will. But that light had no substantial counterpart to correspond to it. I think it came directly from within my heart, because I opened the window of my heart.

This is all Jane saying to herself.

Under LSD: Unnatural Destruction

Seth continued his dictation at 11:25, following Jane's supplement to what Seth had said earlier. Seth said:

In the normal cycle of cellular death and rebirth, and in the constant changing of the ego, there is a smooth process, and no loss of orientation. The memory of previous cells is easily passed from one generation of cells to the next, and there is continuity. As mentioned earlier, what you call the ego rises from your inner identity to face the physical world. Under normal circumstances it will become another ego, and although it loses its dominant position, it does not die, but will change its own organization and become part of the living psyche.

What he means is that your ego rises from the inner self, and it is the part that faces the material world. The ego that rises has its dominant position, but the original inner self does not lose its dominant position; they exist simultaneously. The ego that is born seems to be in charge of your life, but the inner self does not die; rather, it changes its own organization and becomes part of the living psyche.

In an unnatural destruction -- that is, the destruction under the influence of LSD -- there is a frantic attempt at reorganization. That is, the inner self tries to send out substitute egos to handle the situation. The more egos you kill, the more egos will spring up again.

Because the inner self always has to send out a substitute ego to handle the situation in the external material world; it cannot leave itself without someone in charge.

In all such processes, the body is in a highly agitated state, and the entire physical organism is forced to do its utmost to face a series of catastrophic reactions. Yet it understands that it is not actually experiencing that experience physically.

What does this mean? It means your physical body is forced to face a series of virtual, nonexistent, yet completely real-feeling catastrophic reactions -- as if you had gone through a series of wars, disasters, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, as if you had experienced several world wars. It knows these are not real, knows that an imaginary war is being waged, but it cannot stop itself from releasing the chemical components needed to cope with a similar actual situation. So your chemical components and hormones keep being released; your adrenaline and all your body's reactions are fully released, and your body is just as if it had really fought in wars for years, really experienced several earth-destroying catastrophes. Your body and mind are utterly exhausted, and the body suffers great depletion; it is a senseless drain on its natural vitality.

Thought forms reality. Therefore the body is accustomed to reacting to imaginary situations, in which the mind creates terrifying environments that do not actually exist, but these still force the body into an overreaction, resulting in a state of tension.

Under heavy doses of drug treatment, the body feels the greatest threat. Although its own signals tell it that the information it receives has no connection with the actual situation, that information is nevertheless of the utmost urgency, and so it is forced to use all its resources.

Your body is forced to use all its resources to face this urgent information -- a disaster is coming, a volcano is about to erupt, an earthquake, enemies are chasing you. These signals are all of the utmost urgency, and although you know they are imaginary, the body has no choice but to react to such imaginings, because this is normally how our mechanism works. So you can imagine how much depletion your body suffers.

When this situation reaches a certain degree, it is also an assault on the simple biological essence.

Previously the discussion was all about the psychic and spiritual levels; now he is saying that if it reaches a certain degree, it will truly produce a physical assault on your body.

The images and experiences induced by such drugs are seldom forgotten.

Basically they cannot be forgotten. Many people, after taking drugs, will always remember that feeling; they always want to return to that state, sometimes wanting to return to that pleasurable state.

And the new ego, as soon as it is born, carries with it the memory of these experiences.

The old ego has been killed off, and the new ego, as soon as it is born, carries these experiences -- what experiences? The experience of being in the midst of catastrophe. It is like being born into a war-torn battlefield, but if it were a real war, when you were young and did not understand things, your parents would have arranged things well for you, and you would not have felt that experience. But at this time you are feeling that catastrophe with all your perceptions, all your most sensitive awareness -- and moreover with that explosive molecular and atomic capacity for feeling that has already been stimulated by the drug. So that suffering, terror, and pain will be doubled and redoubled, many times stronger than what one would ordinarily experience in normal war and suffering.

Some psychologists like to say that your unconscious crying is a protest against the natural method of your birth. But in this case, what is involved is a self facing its own destruction, while another self rises after having consciously participated in the death of the former self.

Psychologists explain that unconscious crying as a protest against the natural method of birth. Seth says that is not so. To put it simply, a new self has seen the old self being killed alive. At that moment it howls unconsciously, wails, cries out.

I know that many psychologists and psychoanalysts feel that they are using these methods to chart the psyche.

They do not care whether your ego consciousness is destroyed or killed; that is not important. What is important is that once your ego consciousness is gone, your inner world is laid completely bare, and then I know what your psychological world looks like, and I know what problem triggered what other problem. At that point psychologists and psychoanalysts use the theories of their respective schools to make judgments, saying that the reason you have your current problems is because of this, and the reason you are that way is because of that memory. It is as if they have obtained a map of your psyche, and through this they treat you.

Seth was extremely disgusted by this matter; he was on the verge of cursing -- he probably felt too embarrassed to curse outright, but his meaning was just short of cursing.

To dissect a frog to see what makes it live is bad enough.

You dissect a frog, open up its belly, open up all its organs, to see what makes it live, where its life actually comes from -- that is already bad enough. You kill a thing and still want to know why it was alive; is that not utterly absurd?

But to dissect a person's psyche and still hope to restore it to its original state is three times more dangerous.

We cannot learn where a frog's life force comes from by dissecting the frog, so why can we dissect a person's psyche by administering these high doses of hallucinogenic drugs, and still expect to repair that psyche? You are killing his psyche. You have forgotten what Seth said earlier -- you are committing a massacre of the psyche. You are not saving the psyche, not treating it; you are slaughtering it. That is why he says "and still hope to restore it to its original state is three times more dangerous" -- these words are already very harsh; it already has the feeling of killing the goose that lays the golden eggs.

The dictation ended here.

The Cat Named Lonnie

These two really weren't sleepy -- even at this length they still wanted to ask questions. Because back in Session 638, they had mentioned that the cat had died a week earlier, and they had held a funeral for it and buried it in the neighborhood.

Rob said he was putting this material here because many people had written to ask him and Jane about the role pets play in a family and in their belief systems. What role does a pet play in his belief system? He hadn't expected Seth's material to be so in-depth, and it touched on personal privacy. So the following has been edited, yet what remains is still enough to show that this relationship really was quite complex. Rob cut out part of this section, because it involved too much personal and private material about Jane and Rob. After the cuts, what we see below is still very striking -- it was just a stray cat, a stray cat and the position it occupied in their family. Through Seth's analysis, you can sense the inner connections among all things in the world -- very ingenious, incredible.

Here is what Seth said:

The cat would have died that winter. For you, that was a probable death. In one portion of its reality, it did indeed die that winter, while in your reality, you let it live a while longer -- four more years.

It had been shut up in that house over there, frightened nearly out of its mind.

"That side" refers to the diagonally opposite street corner, where there was an old nineteenth-century house that Jane often sketched and drew from her living room. Four winters earlier, that house had caught fire, the people living in it had moved out, and the shell of the house had been boarded up. At that time Lonnie was still a kitten, and it got trapped inside. Every entrance and exit of the house had been nailed shut, and the cat was shut up inside, frightened nearly out of its mind. There was no one there, and the house had just been through a fire, and it was winter -- you can imagine, winters near New York are quite cold. A few days later, a passerby heard its cries and rescued it. Not long after that, the house was torn down.

Ruburt was somewhat afraid of that cat, thinking it was wild, and that it had been shut up before. Just like the mother in Ruburt's mind.

You see, this involves the mother in Ruburt's mind. Ruburt felt he had an obligation to help Lonnie, because he felt the cat was like his mother -- he was afraid of his mother, and she was wild, and she was shut in. Because in her later years his mother was basically paralyzed in bed, from rheumatoid arthritis or something, and she couldn't walk at all or get out of bed, so she just lay in bed all the time, which was the same as being shut in. Although he didn't love her, just as in his early years he had felt obligated to help his mother -- in his early days he had actually been taking care of his mother all along, but even though he was the one caring for her, she kept cursing at him the whole time.

And Lonnie itself knew this. So it became as fat as Ruburt's mother.

This cat was quite amusing, becoming as fat as Ruburt's mother -- his mother lay in bed all day, just eating and never exercising, and since she couldn't get out of bed, she got fatter and fatter. But it was no longer dangerous:

You finally had it neutered.

Because if this little male cat hadn't been neutered, it would have been extremely restless -- it would have gone into heat and made a huge fuss.

If Ruburt's mother could not have children, and Ruburt did in fact get born, then Ruburt would have had a different mother and a different background.

What he means is that Ruburt treated this cat as his mother, deep in his consciousness. Here he uses the neutering of the cat to bring up this topic: if Ruburt's mother had been unable to have children at the time, yet Ruburt did in fact get born. Then if Ruburt's mother hadn't given birth to him, Ruburt would have had to choose a new mother and a different background -- that is, when he incarnated he would have had to make a new choice, and he would not have chosen his current mother. This involves Ruburt's choices in this reincarnation.

This was a male cat. When it was a kitten, before you had succeeded in luring it into your home...

So this cat had previously been a stray on the street. After it was released from that house, it just roamed the streets.

You and Ruburt originally called it Cashaline, that is, when you treated it as a female cat, because you didn't know whether it was male or female. At that time Lonnie often got involved in alley fights among cats, just as Ruburt's father did in various bars all across the United States.

Ruburt's mother was paralyzed in bed, and his father traveled all over the United States, living different lives with different women, and then picking fights in bars -- when he got drunk he would brawl and make trouble. Ruburt grew up in exactly this kind of family environment. So you may remember that for a while -- when she first came into contact with Seth, in the early sessions -- she asked Seth something particularly interesting. At that time she treated Seth as a psychic or a fortune-teller, and she asked Seth: "Can you see where my father is?" Seth said your father is in a place in Florida. She asked: "Who is he with?" With a woman. Then she started asking for details: "Who is that woman? What's her name?" At that point Jane, as a daughter, was still on her mother's side -- she wanted to know who this woman was who had gone off with her father. Seth made a particularly funny decision at that point. Seth said: "I cannot tell you." He told her directly that he couldn't tell her. So it was really amusing -- you can understand Seth as a person; he had a pretty good grasp of human relationships and the ways of the world.

Lonnie itself knew this was an identification, and you also knew it was an identification. But it was willing to use this identity in exchange for a few more years of life.

It had been shut up in that house and might have died in the fire, but everything that happened afterward followed Ruburt's storyline. Ruburt, from the bottom of his heart, regarded this kitten as an image or a symbol of his mother. Lonnie knew this on a spiritual level, so it was willing to accept this identity, to play the role of Ruburt's mother in this respect, and to use it in exchange for a few years of life.

In this process, it learned for the first time how to accept gentleness.

It had never been able to accept gentleness before.

Lonnie even learned how to get along with your other old cat, Willy.

They had another old cat named Willy, and Willy became its mentor.

Ruburt's mother was very afraid of cats, and especially afraid of black cats. And Lonnie was a black cat. Occasionally Lonnie and Ruburt would pass this psychological affliction back and forth between them.

Their psychological affliction was this fear of cats.

Yet it was not a passive recipient, and it also learned from the comings and goings of your downstairs neighbors.

It learned from the neighbors' cats.

Many of Ruburt's feelings toward his mother were buried along with Lonnie.

He took his feelings toward his mother -- because he treated the cat as his mother, so when the cat died they held a funeral for it and buried it in the neighborhood. When he buried it, he buried his feelings toward his mother along with it.

But Lonnie cast off an attitude of distrust that it had brought with it this time, and this was connected with that experience across the street. Therefore it was very grateful to you for giving it these extra years.

It had been distrustful before -- a stray cat distrusts everyone, it trusted no one. But Lonnie cast off this distrust, so it was willing to be taken in by Jane and the others and become a house cat. It was very grateful for the years you gave it.

It was also a symbol of Ruburt's difficult childhood.

Lonnie roamed the streets with no one to support it, just like Ruburt. When Jane was little, her mother was like that, her father was never home, and she grew up in that kind of family, and she didn't fit in with others. So you can imagine, when this cat was roaming the streets, it was very much like Jane's childhood.

And to some extent, this could only be overcome through the natural passage of events.

This childhood experience had to be allowed to pass naturally; only then could much of the pain be overcome.

Last year, with the death of Ruburt's mother...

Ruburt's mother had already passed away. After his mother died, Lonnie's symbolic significance for Ruburt was also complete -- its task as a symbol of Jane's mother was finished. Because it had exchanged its identity as a symbol of his mother for these few years of its own life, and this task was now complete.

Lonnie even performed a final service: through its own death, it made Ruburt confront the nature of biology and suffering.

When Lonnie died, Jane was still in a great deal of pain, because she treated it as her mother. When her mother died, she actually hadn't been this grief-stricken, because her feelings toward her mother had never been expressed. But Lonnie was a little cat, and here she had essentially placed all her guilt toward her mother, all her care for her mother, onto the cat. So when the cat died, she experienced once again that kind of life-and-death parting from her feelings toward her mother. So at this point, the cat made Ruburt face once again something he had never faced before -- the death of the biological body and the nature of suffering.

This was also why his mother had seemed so frightening to him all her life.

Why was he afraid? Because he didn't dare face the nature of biology and suffering. The nature of biology is that sooner or later one dies; suffering -- life, like his childhood, was painful. This cat, through its short few years -- from being shut up in that house, to being a stray on the street, to being taken in by Jane and the others -- step by step gave Jane a focal point for her emotions toward her mother. As a symbol of her mother, it carried Jane's feelings toward her mother. Through these few years of companionship and its final death, Jane truly faced something she had never dared face before. From this matter alone, this cat's significance for Jane was very great -- through its death, Jane began to face this thing.

You can imagine that a cat could have this kind of impact and meaning for Jane and Rob. If Seth hadn't said anything, I imagine they would never have known the meaning behind it -- but they certainly must have felt something. You can see that they repeatedly asked Seth to talk about what this cat meant to them. Why? Because after the cat died, Jane was extremely heartbroken, and that's why she kept bringing the matter up again and again.

This material has already undergone some cuts. When Rob was reviewing the records, he said that in discussing Lonnie, Seth raised the issue of probabilities and hinted at reincarnation. Seth talked about a lot in that section -- Lonnie may have died that year, in its own reality; but in Jane's reality it didn't die, and it lived several more years. For Lonnie, these were two probable worlds: in one world, Lonnie had already died that winter, shut up in that house; in another reality, Lonnie spent all these years with Jane. So he hinted at probabilities, and he also hinted at reincarnation -- hinting that if Jane's mother had been unable to have children, Jane might have chosen another mother, and her entire life background might have been different, and Jane's entire experience of growing up would also have been different.

Before Rob could ask further questions related to this, Seth came back and gave Jane a page of material on a different subject -- Rob actually still wanted to ask about probabilities and reincarnation, but Seth didn't give him the chance. When Jane came out of trance again, she said Seth still had something to say about Willy, something to say about her other cat, but she was too exhausted to continue. By this time it was already 12:21 AM -- they had talked all the way into the early morning hours.

This session was extremely long, but what it said was also very important. He explained very clearly the harm LSD does to people, the slaughter it inflicts on the human psyche. I think anyone who reads this material will understand for the rest of their life where the fundamental danger of drugs really lies.

The Conscious Mind and Feedback Systems

Within both body and mind there are natural feedback systems. They operate to establish the best balance.

A feedback system is the ability to correct deviations. In automated control, computers, or scientific systems, it is what helps you correct when the system deviates. We naturally have such feedback systems within our human bodies, and we grow and develop within them. There is a difference between you and animals and the particular way in which you create your reality -- this feedback system is not the same between humans and animals, because humans have that moment of reflection, and that moment of reflection is actually part of your feedback system. It is there to correct deviations, telling you that something should not be done again next time.

For humans, conscious thought is quite important. This is what this book repeatedly emphasizes. Why is it important? Conscious thought is the director of unconscious activity. You must remember this, and do not get it backwards -- do not think that the unconscious is the master of everything about you. Between them there is a very subtle mutual feedback relationship -- mutual feedback, mutual correction. Do not think that the inner self decides everything and that the outer self is merely a passive executive mechanism, as if once it emerges from the inner self it has no autonomy, no free will, or no capacity for self-determination -- none of that is true. On the contrary, your conscious thought is quite important, because it is the director of your inner unconscious activity.

In a particular way, you must bear more responsibility for physical results. This "more" is relative to our spiritual world -- in the three-dimensional world, if we do something that infringes upon others, we bear great responsibility; but in the spiritual world, those filthy thoughts or shameful deeds that only you yourself know about, you do not need to bear as much responsibility for them, though you should still bear some responsibility. Because if you have studied the reality of probabilities in Seth Speaks, you will know that every thought forms a new world in other realities. But the premise emphasized here is that for humans, we must bear more responsibility for the results in this physical world. Whereas for animals, they do not have this sense of responsibility; their actions rely entirely on instinct.

This provides you with a feedback system between the conscious and the unconscious, so that you can test your experience and change the nature of experience. That is, under the direction of your conscious thought, the unconscious inner self manifests certain events in the three-dimensional world, and the result is not what your conscious thought wanted, as if it were produced by the inner mechanism. At that time this discrepancy makes you think about how to correct yourself, so that it maintains better consistency in the future. This is like what we often call good intentions leading to bad outcomes, or you want a beautiful life, but reality turns out unsatisfactory. This discrepancy itself is a kind of feedback, and this discrepancy and experience are there for you to improve yourself, to reconsider the nature of experience, and it can change the nature of your experience.

The healing system is an important part of this interrelationship, meaning that the healing system itself is a feedback system, and they are often in operation.

The State of Illumination and Grace

In one respect, when the conscious mind and the other levels of body and mind reach a maximum, most stable balance, a state of grace and illumination arises. And this balance is a physiological and spiritual recognition of the integrity of the individual's inner being and of the individual's relationship with the universe.

That is, when your conscious mind reaches the greatest balance with the other levels of your body and mind, and this balance at the same time allows you to recognize, physiologically and spiritually, the integrity of your own inner being and of your relationship with the entire universe, then the state of grace and illumination arises naturally. This state leads to a condition of efficiency in which both mind and body are healthy.

A perceiving, aware mind, through the great flexible space of reason and its connection with the senses, makes it possible for any trivial thing to trigger this experience of illumination. That is, when you trigger the experience of illumination, it is not necessarily some especially great thing; any ordinary, everyday small thing, any trivial thing, can trigger it. The characteristic of the conscious mind is its intense focus of concentration—we could call it narrow, because it includes only the physical plane. Within this physical realm, it has great freedom to interpret this dimension in any way it chooses.

For example, the conscious mind can see every rose as life, or it can see it as death. The same rose, in the eyes of different people—some see love, some see life, some see death—because it will always wither. And in certain circumstances, its interpretation of an ordinary flower can trigger deep experience. Like Daiyu burying the flowers: ordinary flowers were falling, and she gathered them up and buried them, lamenting the passing of life. This state of weeping at the sight of falling flowers is actually the triggering of an emergence of deep experience. And this experience calls forth strength from the inner wellspring of existence, connecting you to the power and energy of the inner self.

Since the nature of ego consciousness has been so misunderstood, you usually think only of its analytical function—feeling that it merely analyzes and interprets a flower—but you do not realize that the conscious mind can directly obtain knowledge from the flower. Ego consciousness divides this larger range of perception into smaller ranges for the sake of understanding; this is very important—the focus of the conscious mind needs to be narrowed. But the conscious mind is also a great synthesizer; it combines the different elements of your experience and integrates them into new patterns.

Simply put, there is a great deal we can perceive in this three-dimensional world. When you walk out the door, you can actually perceive a full 360-degree, all-around perception with no blind spots. But in order to make perception more accurate and focused, you can only observe a portion within your line of sight, and even within that field of vision, you only pay attention to certain points that especially draw your attention. If we processed 360 degrees of information all at once, our brain's processing capacity would not be enough. So narrowing the range of perception is necessary.

But what is so remarkable about the conscious mind? Although it only sees a very narrow angle, a relatively fixed focus, it has a very great synthesizing ability—it can combine past knowledge, events from different periods and different types, and integrate them into a new pattern, producing a new experience and feeling. Thus these new patterns produce an awakening or stimulating effect on the inner portions of the self, forever supplying fresh experience. The inner self responds through the rich nature of its own psyche, constantly sending forth ever-new special abilities to face the outer environment. When your body and mind work together, the relationship between the two becomes very smooth, and their natural healing system places you in a state of health and joy.

Emotion and Belief

I said earlier, for example in Chapter 2, Session 614 -- your emotions flow with your beliefs.

Your emotions flow along with your beliefs, not the other way around. It is not that beliefs change according to the things you encounter and the emotions you feel. Be sure to remember this. So when you encounter certain special emotions, whether good or bad, you should know that these are not things you have no say in deciding. They are all brought about by your belief system. If you feel that this does not seem to be the case, it is because you have no awareness of the contents of the conscious mind. You can close your physical eyes, and you can also close the eye of the conscious mind, pretending not to see -- you can not only shut down the outer senses by means of the outer senses, you can also shut down the inner eye of the conscious mind, and then you become unable to perceive that your emotions actually come along with your beliefs. You take it to be the opposite, thinking that beliefs come along with experiences and emotions, only because you do not believe in or trust your own innate healing functions, or because you have not truly understood the nature of the conscious mind and the unconscious mind, and so you run off to seek external methods of treatment. We seek outside ourselves, feeling that we have no ability to heal ourselves, and so we feel we must see a doctor, take medicine, undergo surgery, and so on.

Sound and Natural Healing

It seems that technology and invention have caused a great deal of harm -- and in fact that is true. But on the other hand, technology has also brought you the great therapeutic gift of music. This method of music therapy activates the cells within your body, stimulates the energy of the inner self, and helps to unite the conscious mind with other portions of the entity. Music is one of the best external expressions of the inner sound that gives life. We discussed in Chapter 5 that there is an invisible sound within the inner body, another form of the body, which constantly produces healing effects within the body. Music consciously reminds you of those deeper inner rhythms, including both sound and motion. Hearing music you like often brings images into your mind, showing you your personal conscious beliefs in different forms. For certain particular people, certain music directly presents itself as images in the mind, and they can paint pictures based on the music.

The following is very important: when you hear the sound of rain, the natural healing of sound can also occur. When you feel unwell or not in a good state, you can find some rain sounds -- there are many rain sound recordings online -- the sound of falling rain has a natural healing function. So many people feel quite comfortable on rainy days sometimes. There is no need for drug-induced hypnosis or meditation; you simply allow the conscious mind to be free, and the conscious mind will automatically flow through thoughts and images, giving itself a kind of healing. Many people ask whether self-healing still requires meditation, sitting practice, or some method of hypnotizing oneself. None of that is needed. You simply let the conscious mind return completely to its free state, back to a natural, relaxed state. So you will see that many people, when healing themselves, go traveling, take cruises, participate in outdoor activities, and release themselves in a completely different way. They do not specifically participate in any meditation activity or special therapeutic work; they just go and have fun, and in the midst of sightseeing and enjoying the landscape, they let the conscious mind flow freely, and it brings about its own healing. Many people's illnesses are cured in just this way.

However, you often avoid this natural healing by running away from frightening conscious thoughts. We do not dare to face our own conscious thoughts; this is our real problem. When a person sees some dark aspects in his own thoughts, he is inwardly afraid and fearful -- he thinks, how could I be such a person, how could I have such terrible thoughts. Actually, these thoughts are not him; thoughts are like clothes -- you may have different aesthetic perceptions at different ages, and you may have worn the wrong clothes or chosen the wrong clothes, but clothes cannot represent you. Thoughts are just thoughts; you can change any thought, and they can never take your place. But in order to avoid facing our own thoughts, we equate those dark, unshowable thoughts with ourselves. Every one of us has bad thoughts and has a dark side; this is normal. Seth repeatedly says that we are not perfect people, and we should not demand perfection of our psyche either, insisting that there cannot be the slightest selfish or distracting thought. If having any selfish or distracting thought means you are impure, then that extends to your spiritual learning being impure, your practice being impure, and all your pursuits being impure -- what does any of that have to do with anything? You must acknowledge the existence of those dark, filthy, base, jealous, and various negative emotions or bad thoughts; only then can you see them and then replace them. If you run away from them and dare not look at them, that will not work. It is like that scene in the movie -- I forget which movie it was, starring Huang Bo, something related to the Japanese invaders. He led a cow back to the village, but all the cows in the village had been killed. As the cow walked past and looked back at its dead companions, Huang Bo covered the cow's eyes with his hand and said, "Don't look, don't look." He was afraid the cow would develop psychological trauma after seeing its companions killed. When we face the dark side of our own hearts, we are just like that cow, not daring to face it. Actually, you just need to look at it -- just like examining those ridiculous clothes you bought when you were young and ignorant, pulling them out of the closet, sorting them, packing them up to give away, donate to charity, or throw away. Thoughts are the same.

In fact, these frightening conscious thoughts will lead you to the source of negative beliefs. For example, jealousy -- whether it is being jealous of others for being beautiful, young, and energetic -- or men being jealous of others for driving better cars, having bigger houses, being richer than you, having fame, status, and power -- all of this is a form of jealousy. You are afraid to face this belief of jealousy, so you run away from it, but even if you run away, the belief is still there. Only by facing it and following it will it lead you to the source of the negative belief, enabling you to face it, and then you can pass through those negative beliefs and enter into feelings of joy and victory. On the contrary, many of you have accepted drug-based methods; such drugs directly impose joyful emotions and thoughts upon you, or force them out from within you, and therefore you do not receive the comfort of the conscious mind's stabilizing effect. This is not achieved through a complete examination of your own thoughts or belief system, so this state is unstable.

The Natural Healing of Dreams

Dreams are one of your best natural therapies, and also a connector between the inner and outer universes, as well as one of your most useful assets. Dreams are very important. Usually you do not analyze your dreams according to your own current beliefs, but instead are taught to interpret dreams in a very formulaic way -- using the Zhou Gong dream dictionary, or going to a psychoanalyst, or various methods online. These formulaic explanations say that things appearing in dreams have a specific meaning, and this meaning is not necessarily your own, but follows the perspective of whatever school of psychology, mysticism, or religion you happen to be interested in. For example, how Freud interpreted dreams¹⁰, or Jung's The Red Book¹¹, which is all about interpreting dreams -- these schools do indeed touch upon a part of the true face of reality, but they all overlook one issue: your dreams have a great personal and highly private nature, and there is the fact that you yourself create reality -- this whole world inside your dream is created by you.

He gives an example: fire has a certain meaning. If you are afraid of fire, then fire represents a kind of disaster -- many people dream of themselves entering a fire scene; if you regard fire as a source of warmth, then it has another kind of meaning -- some people dream of themselves warming themselves by a fire. Whichever of these two meanings applies, it will still be influenced by the changes of all the personal events involved whenever any individual encounters fire. These two symbols are universal, but at the same time they must be related to the changes of your own personal events at that time. This warmth has thousands upon thousands of ways of varying, and that terror also has thousands upon thousands of ways of varying. What fire actually means to you as a person is not simply warmth or disaster; it has much more meaning related to your specific present events.

You are so unfamiliar with the symbols of dreams or the meanings they represent, only because you are not accustomed to using your conscious mind to examine them. You have been told that dreams cannot be understood, and so the connection between dreams and waking experience is overlooked, escaping your attention. Therefore you do not understand that dreams solve quite a few substantial problems for you -- problems in real life, in physical reality, are solved for you in dreams. When you clearly think out your problem consciously, and then slowly drift into sleep, dreams will often help you answer some problems. This is a little trick, very useful. When you encounter a truly difficult problem, when you do not know how to choose or do not know the solution, before going to sleep just think out the problem clearly -- the source of the problem, which people and events are involved, what consequences it may bring -- then think out the problem clearly, slowly go to sleep, and in the dream it will give you an answer. Not one hundred percent of the time, but most of the time it will give you some answers, or give you some symbols and hints.

However, even if you do not consciously make such a request, dreams will still help. Dreams will tell you all kinds of information -- about the state of your body, the general situation of the world, and the possible external circumstances brought about by your current beliefs. When I was teaching Seth Speaks, I gave an example: a parent dreamed that their child had been kidnapped, and the next day the child really was abducted by human traffickers. A couple of days ago, the cousin of a friend of mine dreamed that he was bitten on the head by an enormous black snake. He woke up startled from the dream with a splitting headache; after waking, the whole headache was simply indescribable. Then about two or three days later, when he went out at night to eat at a night market, his head was smashed by a drunk person on the street. After being hospitalized, one eye has already been beaten blind, and he is still in a coma. At the time he had this dream and was very frightened, so he told some people around him, and then two or three days later this thing happened. Dreams are actually giving you a great deal of help and information; it is just that at the time we do not understand what their meaning is. The Seth books, in Seth Speaks, also talk a lot about the symbolic meanings of different levels of consciousness. If a symbol is more specific, the amount of information it carries will be less; if a symbol is less specific, the amount of information it carries will be greater, but because it is not specific, we instead do not know what it is trying to say. So Seth says you should constantly observe and pay attention to your dreams, communicate with them, and sometimes when you are half asleep and half awake, ask yourself: what does this symbol in my dream actually mean? It will tell you.

Dreams provide you with a framework for experimentation, in which you explore possible actions and decide which ones to put into practice. They let you try out various actions in the dream first, so you know which one would be better to take in actuality. It is not only the nightmares mentioned in the previous session -- the therapeutic effect of those terrible dreams on a person, like an electric shock -- other dreams also follow a healing rhythm, and that is more effective than any medicine. Be sure to remember: this healing in dreams is more effective than any medicine. But sleeping pills often interfere with the healing function of dreams -- they make your nerves completely numb, and instead disrupt the natural healing function. So many people do not feel good after taking sleeping pills; they sleep but their head still feels awful, foggy and dizzy. Unless the situation is severe enough that you truly need to take sleeping pills -- for example, if you have not slept for two or three days in a row, then not taking them would produce more serious consequences. But if it is only because sleep quality is poor, waking on and off, or the quality of sleep is not high, these problems do not require sleeping pills to solve. You can adjust your beliefs, do meditation practice, listen to soothing music, or even on a quiet rainy night open the window and listen to the sound of the rain outside -- all of these therapeutic effects are far better than medicine.

In this book, I will discuss how many dreams have creative and healing functions, and provide some methods to help you use them more effectively. Here I only want to point out that there are certain natural pathways that can reach states of self-awareness and grace -- and dreams are one of them. This provides another path for those who believe there is no way other than defeating the ego. By "defeating the ego" I mean using chemical drugs and methods that temporarily deprive the ego of its power, rather than allowing the ego to possess its great capacity for absorption and understanding. Your nature not only possesses natural healing abilities, but can also generate unique and specific private triggers from your own experience, and you can learn to recognize and make use of those natural triggers.

Within this field, there are some events that are quite important. A certain situation may not have much meaning for others, yet it can be used to open the inner storehouse of power within your energy. That is, there are some things that are ordinary for others, but for you, they completely change you -- they open your inner energy and are the switch that puts you in contact with the inner self. These may all be trivial little things. For example, when we were doing the 21-day Creating Abundance meditation practice, many of the small exercises and activities seemed ordinary, but in special circumstances, they could indeed open that door between you and your inner self. Once that door opens, many people feel that their whole person is completely different. These are your triggers, and you should remember them.

This kind of situation can happen while awake, and it can also happen in dreams. If you remember a certain kind of dream that, upon waking, makes you feel full of energy, then before sleep you should deliberately recall those dreams and tell yourself that they will come again, that the dream will return. Next time before sleeping, think about such dreams and tell yourself that tonight you will have a similar dream again, and then that dream will come back, bringing you a new kind of healing, and you will once again be refreshed, full of vigor, and throw yourself into daily life and work. These should all be called triggers -- those triggers that can activate your body's self-healing functions.

Any action that may seem very silly or very strange, if it can bring you a sense of satisfaction, then there is no harm in doing it. Any natural healing method can even carry you beyond physical and mental health into a feeling of exuberance, reaching a sublime experience of awareness and grace. So how do you use it? If doing certain things brings you a sense of satisfaction, no matter how silly or strange it seems, just go do it. Some people enter a state of satisfaction while playing badminton, some while playing Go, some while dancing, some while painting, doing calligraphy, creating, writing songs -- satisfaction can arise in all kinds of situations. There are also people who gain satisfaction in the process of doing laundry, and people who gain satisfaction when they tidy up the house until it is spotless. Everyone is different. As long as something can bring you a sense of satisfaction, do not worry about what kind of activity it is. Doing the things that bring you satisfaction will bring about a natural healing, and it can carry you to a state beyond physical and mental health -- not just physical and mental health, it makes you full of vitality, and can lift you to a higher level in a state of awareness and grace, reaching a sublime experience.

At the same time, being immersed in art is also highly therapeutic. Because the creation of works of art is a refined combination leaping from the conscious mind and the unconscious mind. Later I will slowly explain the deep relationship that exists among dreams, creativity, and personal experience.

The Biggest Step Toward Awareness

The most renewing idea, and the biggest step toward reaching true awareness, is to realize that your invisible world of reality leaps into outer life through your own conscious thoughts and beliefs. For then you realize your power, and you are immediately given the opportunity to choose.

That is to say, if you want to take the most crucial step toward entering the state of awareness, you must realize this one thing: your invisible world of reality leaps into outer life through your own conscious thoughts and beliefs. Remember, it is your own conscious thoughts and beliefs—whether projected into the outer world or manifested into the outer world. When you realize this, you realize your power, and you are immediately given the opportunity to choose.

The Key Step: Believing That Your Outer World Is Created by Yourself

Seth says that if you want to enter the state of clear awareness, the most crucial step is to realize this: your invisible world of reality leaps into outer life through your own conscious thoughts and beliefs. This key point can only be entered and made manifest through your own conscious thoughts.

Once you understand this, you realize your own power, and you are immediately given the opportunity to choose. What does it mean to be given the opportunity to choose? It means you know that your outer world does not happen passively; it is something you can choose. Whatever kind of outer world you want, you can have that kind of outer world. Because this outer world leaps out through your conscious thoughts and beliefs.

You can no longer regard yourself as a victim of objective circumstances. You are not a victim, and you are not a casualty. Many people adopt a victim mentality on many issues: "My current state is all because my boss is no good, the environment is no good, the general climate is no good, the world economy is no good, all sorts of reasons -- parents, colleagues, bosses, the environment, the heavens." They place themselves in a victim mentality of "I am passive, I have no choice, there is nothing I can do."

If you cannot recognize this point, or if you get stuck on this point, then it will be very difficult for you to enter a true state of awakening. This is the most crucial point. Many people will say: "How am I supposed to recognize it? I am half believing and half doubting -- I believe part of what Seth says, but I also have doubts about what he says. Because I have only been listening to him for a few days, maybe a month or two, and watched a few of his videos or programs. But decades of life experience in my real life has vividly shown me that the outer material world is so real, so unshakable. And you, Seth, tell me that all of that is merely projections and illusions of my own inner self. For me to be half believing and half doubting is already pretty good; asking me to believe completely and trust one hundred percent -- I cannot do that."

This is the state of most people. And the result lies precisely here: the result of your half believing and half doubting comes from the "half believing and half doubting" itself. Half believing and half doubting is your present belief, and the result that emerges will be one of half believing and half doubting. In your life you will occasionally encounter small examples of things happening as you wished, small proofs that beliefs create reality, but at those times you are half believing and half not believing -- you will think, "This is really interesting, whatever I think of just comes to me."

There are too many examples of this. For instance, suppose today you do not want to go out, but you have already made plans with a friend to go out in the afternoon for tea, shopping, or strolling. But ever since you got up this morning, you have not wanted to go; you have a new mindset and state. Yet you know that in society people must keep their word; since you already agreed, it would seem awkward to say you are not going now. Although our inner self tells us we should stay consistent with it and remain in a state of alignment, we live in the three-dimensional world, and sometimes we cannot manage that. But in your heart you really do not want to go, and then something very strange happens -- before half an hour or an hour has passed, your friend will send you a message saying: "Oh, sorry, something came up today, we cannot go shopping today, let us reschedule." You will find that this kind of thing happens a lot; all sorts of strange things happen.

A netizen in our group had a similar experience. He wanted to take a course -- something like a life coaching course, a kind of NLP course. It was also a course he wanted to use to share and help others, but courses like that all had to be held offline, and they were the kind that issued certification; the courses were generally several dozen hours long, and they had to be face-to-face before the instructor could issue the certificate. But a strange thing happened: just when he especially wanted to take this course, he got stuck on the road from Bolivia to Argentina. Because while he was traveling, the pandemic suddenly broke out in South America, the borders were all sealed, and he was stuck there with nowhere to go. He ended up living in that small town for about two or three months; the town was practically cut off from the world, and it produced red wine. But his attitude was excellent; he simply accepted the circumstances and stayed there. This netizen is called Crystal, in our QQ group. Then on Facebook he suddenly came across a very famous teacher offering an online life coaching course of this kind, one that still issued certificates, and the entire course cost only seven dollars. He could hardly believe it, but it really happened. Of course, he would say, "I participated in the 21-day meditation, the abundance journey, and then it gave me this kind of feedback" -- that is only one side of it. Where is the key? The key is that in the process of studying Seth Speaks and these other spiritual materials, he was also studying Bashar and other materials, and he was gradually coming to believe in this matter. Starting from some small so-called "small magical things in life," he believed step by step.

Therefore, if you want to reach the state of clear awareness as quickly as possible, or enter into a feeling and state of being graced, the most important point is this: you must believe that your outer world is a projection of your inner world, produced through your conscious beliefs. The sooner you believe this, the sooner you can enter such a state. If you are half believing and half doubting about this matter itself, then it is possible that you will experience a long period of tugging and hesitation in the process.

The simplest example: at our Seth center in Los Angeles, Teacher Cha told a key story at the time. When he was speaking to one of our students, Dingshan, he said: "Just believe it for now; believe it first and see what happens." Because when Dingshan first started studying this, he was also half believing and half doubting, always awkwardly stuck there, and his state at the time was not good either -- he also had depression, and his whole person was gloomy. But in the process, when he really followed Teacher Cha's advice and said, "Then I will believe it first, and after believing I will see what happens; there is nothing to lose," after he believed, his whole person underwent a fundamental change. He began to become more optimistic, more positive, more confident in his own abilities, and then he moved toward a very optimistic, completely different state of life.

Therefore, when you study spiritual materials, you must put them into practice. You should take the curiosity of a child doing an experiment, of exploring, and see whether your mind, or your inner world, can actually be made manifest in the actual three-dimensional world with the support of your conscious beliefs. You can try it and see whether this abundance is produced in your life, whether abundance surrounds you. But here you need to have a broad understanding of abundance: do not define abundance only as a specific solution you want. The solution of abundance may be different -- it may be financial, it may be material, it may also be spiritual, it may be a kind of insight, it may be a state, it may be a feeling. So do not define this abundance as merely one specific thing. Abundance is a by-product of yours; your state, the state of oneness with your inner self, is what matters most.

Session 640

Consciousness arises so that you can have more choices

Seth goes on to say:

Consciousness, however, also arises precisely so that the self can have more choices. So that you are not left with only one road to travel, but can use your own creativity to form a richly varied inner content.

In other words, when you are choosing the direction of your future development, you cannot treat yourself as the one being victimized, as a victim, as a sacrifice. You have many roads you can take, and your consciousness arises precisely so that you have many choices when choosing. So many choices are in your hands, so why would you insist on choosing the road you hate most, the one you dislike the most? Since you clearly do not like it, why do you still choose it? This is the typical victim mentality. Your consciousness exists so that you can have more choices, so that you can use your own creativity to form a richly varied inner content that belongs only to you.

Seth emphasizes this point again:

Let me make this clearer once more: your personal conscious beliefs direct the unconscious flow, and the unconscious flow brings your thoughts back into the physical world. Therefore, although your thoughts form your experience, you do not know how this process occurs.

This sentence actually completely sums up what Abraham says in the Law of Attraction material¹², as well as the core idea in the 21-Day Abundance Challenge, which is the operating law of our entire universe. We are now living in a three-dimensional world, and if this three-dimensional world of ours has any law, or any bug, then this is its bug. If after finishing the Seth books you have only grasped this one sentence, then you are living a completely cheat-code life: you command the wind and rain, and whatever you want can be yours.

Every point in this sentence is important. First, "your personal": this is not someone else's, it must be your own. Then "conscious": it must be a conscious belief; unconscious beliefs do not work. What does "conscious" mean? We also talked about this in The Human Robot Instruction Manual: it actually refers to your active consciousness, not those inactive parts of consciousness. That is, the activated consciousness, not the consciousness that has not been activated. Here we should not substitute the term "subconscious," because most of what is in our subconscious is actually already activated consciousness, but we as people do not know it has been activated. We hide it away, turn a blind eye to it, push it aside, but it is still active: it is active, activated consciousness. It is also a core, key part of your belief system, yet you do not know it exists. You think it no longer exists, but it is still functioning.

Then, this conscious belief directs the unconscious flow. What is the unconscious flow? It is your inner self, it is your inner being. You cannot feel its existence; it is completely unconscious, and you do not know what it is doing. This unconscious flow brings your thoughts, your wishes, your heartfelt desires, your longings, your most genuine intentions, into the physical world. Be sure to remember who brings them in: it is not your conscious mind that brings them in, it is the unconscious flow that brings them in. But this unconscious flow is under the direction of your conscious beliefs; that is the relationship. Then it manifests in the physical world, completing the process from the formless realm to the realm of form.

Therefore, although your thoughts form your experience, you do not know how this process occurs. You do not need to know, because our human capacity for understanding and the current wisdom of our human brain cannot comprehend this process. Seth has also explained a great deal, from many angles: for example, starting from Chapter 5 of Seth Speaks, he talks about the points of physical intersection, energy, small black holes, small white holes, our units of consciousness, our EE units, and then how consciousness descends into matter and how matter is transformed and produced. He has already talked about many, many, many things, but he is only giving us a way to glimpse a small part of it, so that we can have a rough idea. As for the specifics of how it transforms, the specific process of that transformation still cannot be described.

For example, you want an ideal partner, and then two months later he appears, and in every way he is what you wanted, completely matching your requirements. This is not at all a material thing: the moment you see him, you fall in love with him; the moment you see him, your heart is full of joy, and you think, "How could such a person appear? This is exactly the person I wanted." So I want to ask you: how is this process, this process of manifestation, accomplished? This is very hard to explain with language and human thought. If you manifest a table or a chair, that is easier to explain; if you manifest a few million dollars, that can still be explained. But a living, breathing person appears in your life: how do you explain that? He has his own beliefs, he has his own consciousness, he has his own soul. How does he appear in your life at this particular point in time? How is the relationship between the two of you produced? Is it based mainly on you, or mainly on him? He is your ideal Prince Charming, but are you the ideal little princess of his dreams? You can imagine that the process in between is not so simple. So Seth says, you do not know how it happens, and you do not need to worry about how it happens; you just need to know this principle, know this law.

This is somewhat like what we originally wrote in The Human Robot Instruction Manual and The Manual for Living in Abundance: they all say the same thing. In Abraham's terms, all the contrasting experiences you go through in daily life, that is, this world of dualistic opposites, will produce two thoughts in you: one is "I want to live a better life," and the other is "I do not want that kind of thing, I do not like those things." This produces a desire and a wish in your heart, and this desire and wish arise naturally; you do not need to do anything special to create them. With this naturally arising wish, you hand it over to your heart, to your inner being, and submit your deepest wish to it. And at that point it will manifest it: in your inner world there is something like a vortex, and within that vortex it has already completed the manifestation in the spiritual world, in the inner world.

The next thing you need to do is stay aligned with your own heart, stay aligned with the frequency of the wish you want. Do not say one thing and mean another; you must stay aligned with it. When you feel joyful, happy, satisfied, and blessed, that is when you are aligned with your inner being; when you feel uncomfortable in your heart, when you have negative emotions, when you feel awkward and out of sorts, that is when you are not aligned. When you stay aligned, you do not need to manage it anymore; you just keep strengthening this thought, this wish, this intention in your heart. Somehow, it comes into being in real life; it manifests, and it manifests in all kinds of magical ways. This step sounds very much like a fairy tale. This is exactly the place where all the scientists attack you, attack us, attack spiritual learning: they think you are talking nonsense, with no scientific basis and no basis in physics.

You do not need to worry about it. Seth says this is indeed something humans cannot understand, so it is normal for some people to doubt it. Do not say, "Why does he doubt you?" Let him doubt; any person would doubt it, because this thing really cannot be explained clearly. If it cannot be explained clearly and you still demand that people not doubt you, then you are being unreasonable. So do not worry about him; just do what you want to do, and prove it to him through your actual life. When you live out the life you wanted to live, when you live out your true self, when you live radiantly and full of vitality every day, then naturally he will come and ask you: "Hey, what has been going on with you lately? It is like you have turned on cheat codes." When he comes to ask you, then you can tell him: "This is just what I have been doing; it is very simple." But before that, trying to force someone to believe you is impossible.

You Cannot Ask for Awareness While Believing the Opposite

Seth says, you cannot fiercely tell yourself, "I want to attain awareness, I want to become enlightened," and then fiercely tell yourself every day, "I want to become enlightened," and expect it to happen. If all your beliefs are actually moving in the opposite direction, then it will not work. You cannot have one set of thoughts in your mind while your actual beliefs are another set. Most of us are this kind of hypocrite in life, so in your actual life you often cannot get what you want -- because you yourself do not even believe in the thing you say you want. The kind of life you say every day that you want to live, you yourself do not even believe you will really have it. How can something you yourself do not believe in appear in your life? You are just saying it for the sake of saying it, comforting yourself, comforting others.

For example, Jack Ma is that rich. Do you really believe you will be as rich as he is? You do not believe it, so you are not as rich as he is. It is that simple. When you believe it, then you will become it.

Seth says, why would you move in the opposite direction? Because you feel you do not deserve it, or you believe you cannot possibly reach the state of awareness. In this situation, you are sending out contradictory messages, and so you will not become concerned with the way in which the purpose of your consciousness "is unconsciously created." You do not really care, because you simply do not believe it can be done. This is very realistic. In real life, many people feel they do not deserve enlightenment: "How could I possibly become enlightened? That is something only people who have practiced for decades can have. Those people have read through who knows how many books, and then had several lifetimes of practice, reincarnation, eminent monks and great masters -- only then is it possible. They have not even become enlightened, so how could I? I am an ordinary office worker who could not be more ordinary, still squeezing onto the subway every day, living a nine-to-five life, still working hard and rushing around for my little life. How could I become enlightened? I would at least have to live in a world of mountains and rivers, birdsong and fragrant flowers, and only after I have solved financial freedom and time freedom, and can fully control my own life, could I possibly reach that state of enlightenment, right? I am a nobody living at the bottom of society. How could I possibly become enlightened?" Whether in terms of material conditions or in spirit, he feels he does not deserve it, does not have the qualifications, does not believe he can do it -- then he cannot do it, and he really will not be able to become enlightened.

Sex, Mystical Experience, and Natural Healing

Seth says that if you do not hinder sex with contrary beliefs, then sex is also another natural healing system. This kind of sexual relationship, this lovemaking itself is a healing system, a natural healing system. But because we humans have placed obstacles around sex itself, we have preconceived notions about it, feeling that it is bad, immoral, violating this or that. Whatever your beliefs may be -- social, parental, religious, cultural -- beliefs from all directions pile up and give you the idea that "sex is bad, it is inherently filthy, sordid," and so on, giving you many negative beliefs. Once these negative beliefs come in, the healing or therapeutic effect of sex disappears, because your beliefs are negating it.

The simplest example of this is in ancient Chinese culture, in Daoism, where there is this practice of "taking yin to supplement yang"¹³, taking yang to supplement yin, dual cultivation of man and woman. In Hinduism there is also much of this, and in Tibetan Buddhist tantra¹⁴ there is also this highest vehicle -- in Vajrayana there is also the emergence of the consort, and the highest-level empowerment in Vajrayana, the final empowerment, is right here. So the core of this is to look at what your beliefs about sex itself are. From what angle you view sex, what your belief system is like -- that determines whether it can play a healing role in your life.

Seth continues:

Not clothed in the cloak of dogma, natural mystical experience is the original religious therapy. It is so often distorted by church organizations. It represents man's innate recognition of his oneness with the source of his own existence and experience.

All kinds of natural mystical experiences -- folk healing methods, spirit dancing, the mysterious ritualistic feelings in various religions, giving you a bit of holy water, drawing a talisman for you, having you drink it down, and so on -- if these are not clothed in the cloak of dogma or the cloak of religion, then this natural mystical experience itself is effective. But it has been distorted by church organizations or other mystical organizations, and once distorted it loses its healing effect, becoming a way of swindling money or deceiving people into joining a religion. If its essence has not been distorted, it represents man's innate recognition of his oneness with the source of his own existence and experience.

Chemicals, Dreams, and the Body

Seth says that the soul is not merely draped in a chemical garment -- this was from the previous session. Why say the soul is draped in a chemical garment? Because when the soul is in the physical body, it is influenced by these chemical elements, just like a garment. And this garment is woven from all the elements of the earth. When you have a physical body, any chemical element, food, or drug that becomes part of your body will cause some changes in you. But this influence still follows your personal beliefs -- your beliefs still take the lead.

The most typical example here is this: many people say that if you drink unclean water, some people will get diarrhea and some will not. It is the same water, yet some people are fine. For example, when we go to the countryside and see some of its dietary habits, including the way it makes its own food, we feel that none of it is healthy enough. The process of making fermented soybean paste, for instance, is simply unbearable to watch, and that includes some traditional foods -- the processes are all unbearable to watch. But it tastes very fragrant, and the local people all grow up very healthy. Yet if an outsider has bad beliefs about it, you will get diarrhea after eating it -- you really will get diarrhea. This is not a joke; it is caused by your beliefs.

Let me give a simple example. Once a large group of us went traveling in India, several dozen people or so. Because I had been to India before, I had no problems at all, but all of them were having diarrhea. Actually the food was already very delicious -- a lot of Indian food is very delicious -- but many people felt that India is just dirty, chaotic, and poor, and the moment they imagined that feeling they could not stand it, so the actual physical reaction really was diarrhea, and not just ordinary diarrhea. And what was especially amazing about this diarrhea was that the anti-diarrhea medicines brought from China could not cure it -- furazolidone and the like, none of them could cure it. Then they could only go buy local anti-diarrhea medicine locally, and one dose would fix it -- truly amazing. When they asked the locals what to do about diarrhea, they said just buy this medicine, and as it turned out, after taking it most people got better, and after a couple of days most people got used to it and stopped having diarrhea. The same substance entering your body -- some people are fine, and some people are not. What is more, some people are immune to a hundred poisons; they simply believe that the poison has no effect on them, and they are fine.

Seth says:

Your dreams and the physical events of your life constantly alter the chemical balance of your body.

The things that happen in your dreams and the things you encounter in life are constantly altering your chemical balance. Your dreams can provide a channel of release that your daily life does not have, and these dreams will mobilize your resources and release the hormones you need. They mobilize your body's chemical resources and produce certain changes in your body's hormones, and these hormones are precisely what you ordinarily need. It will create a tense dreamscape because it needs these hormones, so it needs a tense dreamscape -- under this tense dreamscape you will produce the corresponding hormones, and these hormones are what you need, bringing the organism's healing into a state of combat readiness, so that certain symptoms of the body disappear.

This is very interesting. When a person's hormones -- for example, when adrenaline is secreted at high concentration -- many symptoms naturally disappear. In very urgent situations, when entering a state of war, some minor physical ailments from ordinary times will naturally disappear. If you really enter a battlefield, you will find that small injuries and illnesses, a cut on your hand, are simply no big deal at all. But in ordinary life, if you cut a big gash in your hand, it can hurt for several days, with all that treating and changing of dressings.

Seth also says:

In another dream, perhaps a dreamlike interlude of tranquility is provided, in which all tensions are reduced to a minimum, also causing certain excessively discharged hormones and chemicals to decrease.

On the one hand it can increase your hormones, and on the other hand, through a dreamlike tranquil dream, it can bring your hormones to a minimum, bringing all tensions to a minimum, entering a very serene state within the dream. So your dreams can directly regulate your body's hormones, and this kind of dream is extremely effective. This kind of dream that regulates the body's chemical balance is sometimes very short, unless the conscious mind is willing to face the beliefs that caused this imbalance.

What does this mean? If your conscious mind can resolve the unbalanced beliefs, then you do not need to resolve them through dreaming; if it cannot, then dreams can be a way of resolving them.

Seth goes on:

A heavy dose of chemicals from the outside, however, brings you into an entirely different situation. It adds new pressures, in a dilemma that makes the conscious mind believe its position is even more precarious than before, and it loses great confidence in its own abilities.

Your conscious mind no longer believes in its own abilities, and it is in a state of extreme powerlessness -- because the situations it faces are all ones it cannot resolve, the situations it faces after taking the drugs. After this kind of treatment, the conscious mind may have heightened experiences -- it enters a state similar to a battlefield, or an extremely high state -- but it feels that all its adventures are built upon problems it does not understand. It does not know where all those bizarre and dazzling things come from, and its ability to deal with physical reality is even worse than before.

All people who take drugs, or who use hallucinogens over a long period, will find that their ability to live is extremely poor, almost to the point where their ability to live simply fails. But the natural inner healing in our ordinary personal lives is different. This is what psychologists should understand and encourage -- this natural method of healing, rather than using large doses of chemical hallucinogens.

Your Body Is Your Own Living Sculpture

Seth goes on to say:

Right now your body is your own living sculpture, not only in its shape, structure, and nature, but also in its miraculous senses and its unique effect on others.

It is not only a matter of outward appearance; you have also endowed this sculpture with creativity. This sculpture of yours is not dead; it has creativity. As you continue to create this image, the body's innate abilities also help you sustain life. All these creative sources well up from your inner identity, and your inner identity can never be fully materialized in the flesh. Your physical body can never completely, one hundred percent express your inner identity; it can only express a part of it, so you always have some unused creativity available to you. Because the manifestation of our self, our identity, in the physical body is only a part, and a great part of it cannot be shown, you have infinite creativity that has not yet been used.

Seth says that you form your body, but then you react to it. You have formed this living sculpture of yourself, but you still react to the body itself. There is a constant interaction between the creator and the created. Who is the creator? It is your inner self. Your inner self creates your body, and this body is the created thing, but there is constant interaction between the inner self and the created thing. In the world of our three-dimensional space, the creator has thus also become part of the created — our inner self seems to become part of our body, so much so that it is hard to distinguish the two. It seems as if our inner self exists within our body, giving you the illusion that the creator has become part of the created. This is not in keeping with common sense; the creator must surely be greater than the created, so how could you become part of it? But that is how it feels to you, and so it is very hard for you to tell them apart.

He gives the example of a painter. If a painter puts a part of himself into his painting — what he paints is a pastoral scene, but when he himself walks into that pastoral scene, you place everything about yourself into your body. When you put yourself into the painting, you place everything you know about yourself into your body, and therefore the body becomes a concrete likeness of you. An artist loves his work; in fact, when he lays down his brush, the painting is finished, at least as far as he himself is concerned. But the influence of that painting continues — he is no longer painting, the creation of the painting is complete, but the influence of the painting continues.

Yet throughout your life, you are still creating your physical image and presenting yourself within it. A painter does not look out through the eyes of his creation and see the room where the painting hangs — for example, a painter paints a self-portrait and hangs it on the wall, but the painter in the painting cannot look through his own eyes and see the room where the painting hangs; he cannot see it. But you can. We human beings can peer out at the universe through our own eyes. This is very interesting — when we exist through this materialized physical image created by our inner self, we can look outward from within our body.

Seth says:

Then you have not only created your body, but you have also created its entire experience.

You have created its external environment — you have not only made a sculpture, you have also arranged the surroundings for this sculpture: its room, its city, its external events. That is to say, you have not only created yourself, but also created the environment around you. You have given yourself a three-dimensional existence as the background in which experience takes place. This three-dimensional existence needs a background in which to occur, just as an artist gives a work a dimension — if he wants to paint a figure, he must paint the background of that figure: whether the figure is before a table, standing in front of a house, or standing in a field. This background is what the painter gives to the figure. And when you create yourself, you also create a world for yourself.

Seth also says:

The trees in a landscape painting will not be shaken by the wind that blows through three-dimensional space. But the figure in a painting of a person, if the eyes are painted open, cannot close them.

If you paint the eyes open, he cannot close them. But we are different — we move about freely in the world we ourselves have created; if we want to open our eyes, we open them; if we want to close them, we close them; wherever we want to explore, we go and explore. We are alive, not dead like a work of art.

The scenery in a painting is painted on canvas or wood, but your soul is not painted on your body. Your soul enters your body and becomes part of the body. Your physical body cannot contain all of your identity, and the part that is not contained unconsciously creates your physical body. It is precisely the part not contained by the physical body — that is your unconscious part — that is creating your physical body.

Once again, we direct the physical image through beliefs, but our inner unconscious inner self creates the physical existence. Here he is again repeatedly emphasizing things he has said before; there is nothing completely new, only the same content explained in a different way, with different language, and from a different angle.

Epilogue

The end of this session is quite interesting. After Seth says he has synthesized all these elements into a psychological whole, he declares:

Seth says these sessions came about through your -- Rob and Jane's -- experience as biological beings, and through your desire to seek personal answers. But more fundamentally, they came about to find answers to the questions of your entire species, of all humanity.

Because in the middle he inserted a passage about their personal issues. So the whole of Seth Speaks, or the entire body of Seth material, originally began in order to answer the questions you, as a biological existence, wanted to ask about your own personal issues -- you wanted to know the answers, so I came to answer your questions. But at the most fundamental level, these answers are not just answers to your personal questions; more importantly, they are answers to the questions of humanity as a whole, of the entire species. This is Seth making a higher-level summary and conclusion of the book.

The Artist's Statue

Jane took two out-of-state phone calls, so the session started a bit later than usual. At that point Seth said, "Are you ready?" and Rob said, "I don't know why I'm a little distracted," and he was joking. Then Seth said that the content of this book is about an artist using his conscious mind, creative ability, physical body, and inner resources to create a statue.

If an artist wants to make a statue, he must have his conscious mind, his creative ability, his physical body -- he has to chisel it, carve it -- and his inner resources, that is, the ever-flowing ability of the inner self. When he deliberately decides to create a statue, for example, when he has chosen a large piece of stone, he will automatically direct his energy in that direction, that is, toward the image of the statue in his mind; he directs his energy in that direction.

And when we human beings form our own bodies, when we form our own living, breathing statue, that is far more important to you than any work of art. Making a work of art, making a marble statue or a wooden statue, that is only a statue; but what you are now carving is yourself, a living person. So you are certainly more important than any other statue, and you should of course follow the same path, that is, the same path the artist follows in creating a statue. In other words, you should direct your energy toward creating a healthily functioning body, and focus your energy there.

You are constantly forming your image, and this is an ongoing process, not something that happens all at once.

Session 641

Just as many artistic processes are invisible and unseen.

How does this composer write a song, how does a painter's image emerge in the mind -- these are all invisible and unseen, and sometimes cannot be described in words. And likewise, the inner mechanism by which you create your physical self is also hidden beneath the surface of the conscious mind. That is, how we create the physical self, how we create the bodily self -- this process is something we cannot perceive; it is hidden beneath our consciousness. Nevertheless, even though we cannot perceive it, that mechanism is nonetheless highly effective.

The Therapeutic Role of Dreams

Just as the creation of any art is closely connected with dreams, all art is related to dreams, and so too is the creation of this living physical statue that is your body closely related to dreams. Because dreams have a great therapeutic effect on the body. If there is any chemical imbalance in the body, it is often automatically corrected in dreams. You will create a situation that leads to the production of hormones, secreting different hormones under different circumstances, just as you would in a similar waking situation.

This therapeutic effect comes about in this way: it produces a scene that it needs, the kind of scene in which, if you were in your ordinary waking state, you would naturally secrete similar hormones; and in dreams it is the same, it creates the same kind of scene so that you also secrete the same hormones, producing the same healing effect on your body.

In the drama of dreams, the dream itself is like acting in a play. You play a role and creatively solve the problem that caused this imbalance. From this perspective, a very aggressive dream may be quite beneficial for a certain person, because he releases emotions that he usually suppresses. For example, he never dared to fight in reality before, and he could not express his anger, but in the dream he fiercely fought with someone and beat them thoroughly. He released all of these things and relieved the tension in his body. Through this kind of regular dream therapy, both body and mind receive great adjustment. Therefore your physical body is influenced by dreams.

Let me give a simple example. There was a friend who had a very deep fear in his heart, so deep that he did not know how to heal it, because it was very hard to reach in real life. Once, roughly speaking, he had a dream. He dreamed of a river that he was especially afraid of when he was a child, because people often drowned in that river. We also had this kind of thing when we were children: in some reservoir, every year or two someone might drown in it, and then everyone would say "the water ghost is calling for people," as if every summer some child drowned while swimming. He was especially afraid of this river, but actually this river was only a symbol of that fear.

Then one night he had a dream, and he dreamed of this river. He was by the riverbank, and somehow he was pulled into the water. He was extremely frightened, and then he saw a female ghost crawl out of the river, with disheveled hair, about to drag him in. He felt that the force was extremely strong, not the kind of real pulling force, but an invisible force.

At that moment he was truly terrified, but this fear also stirred up an enormous rage in him. He thought, why should you drag me in, so he took an action that he would never have dared to take in ordinary life: he fiercely grabbed the female ghost by the hair and beat her, tore at her, punched her, scratched her, clawed at her, as if he had gone mad, not caring for his own life, as if it were a fight to the death. And with this round of tearing and fighting, he beat the female ghost away.

After he woke up, although he still had that feeling of fear from the dream, he was never afraid of that river again. Most importantly, the deepest fear in his heart was more than half gone. That was a symbol of fear: he was afraid of ghosts, afraid of the ghost in the river. In fact, when he was a child, someone must have told him this kind of experience, and this impression appeared in his dream. But through this one experience in the dream, he overcame this fear, and it was also a very good treatment for his body and mind. If this fear had not been removed, it might have produced other problems in the body in the future.

In dreams, an object may be a symbol.

But there is no universally applicable dream symbol: no single thing symbolizes the same thing in everyone's dreams, for each person's experience has too many variations. Indeed, sometimes in dreams you touch some of the deepest sources of the entity, but even there, the expression of that existence is highly individualized. You cannot impose a meaningless meaning upon all identical symbols. Why call it meaningless? Because this thing is meaningful to you, but meaningless to someone else; and moreover, this meaning itself is what the conscious part of you later becomes aware of, and it is no longer the original meaning that was truly trying to express itself through this symbol.

The Fallacy of the Art Critic

In the realm of art there is a useful analogy: although all artists use the same material—human experience—the "greatness" of a work of art depends on the brilliant uniqueness of the individual creator, and this uniqueness points to what humanity performs together and rests upon.

This passage from Seth is particularly long. To put it simply: all artistic creation uses human experience to create, and artists all use the same material. The reason you can appreciate a work of art is that you have human experience. The same work of art, in the eyes of a cat or a dog, is not a work of art at all—they have no feeling for it whatsoever, because they do not have human experience.

No matter what material a work of art uses—paintbrushes, musical notes, poetry, words, sculpture—it all uses the same material, which is human experience. But the "greatness" of a work of art depends mainly on the brilliant uniqueness of the individual, its one-of-a-kind quality. If everyone could paint this thing, then it could not be called a "great" work. And this uniqueness points to what humanity shares and performs upon—it is first of all an experience shared by humanity, but it also performs its uniqueness.

When you watch Hollywood blockbusters or look at those works of art, once you become familiar with them you will find there is a common formula: they can use the common empathy of humanity very well, and from this common empathy they can shape and present a completely different, relatively independent display of unique individuality. But this uniqueness must never be detached from the foundation of common human experience—that is the core and the premise.

Afterwards, art critics may point out its patterns.

After the artistic creation is finished, many art critics will come to comment on it, saying that this work of art belongs to a certain category or a certain school—Impressionism, the Renaissance, a certain school of the Tang, Song, Yuan, Ming, or Qing dynasties—and classify it. Then they connect the images or symbols in this painting with those in other paintings—here a horse is painted, and in that painting there is also a horse, so should all these paintings of horses be grouped into one category? They all make such generalizations, and then arrive at a wrong conclusion.

Why? Because they believe these symbols are universal, but this is entirely a matter of individualization—the reason an artist is great is precisely his uniqueness. "Always appropriate, and no matter where one looks at these symbols, they must necessarily have the same meaning"—this is our mistaken view. But such meanings may have nothing whatsoever to do with the artist's own interpretation of his symbols or with his personal experience. Therefore the artist may feel puzzled: how could those art critics possibly fabricate something out of nothing?

The following passage was written by Rob. Rob said, this is absolutely right:

Because I am also a painter myself, I have a deep personal understanding of the flaws of art criticism. They are sometimes laughable and often repugnant. I have also been praised and criticized for elements that did not exist in my pictures, while my intentional purposes were ignored, and sometimes even incomprehensible—were they really talking about my paintings?

This is a feeling that most artists have. To be frank: so-called art critics are people who had a dream of art but could not realize it themselves, could not reach the level of those great artists, so they settled for second best, projecting their own imagination of art outward, and then using their own imagination to analyze other people's paintings. In truth, the gap between their level and that of these artists is like the distance between heaven and earth—they have no qualification at all to comment on other people's paintings.

But this is the reality of real life. Whether in America or anywhere in the world, if a painter wants to become famous, without a series of art critics or collectors to promote him, it is very hard to become known. Today's world of modern art has already drifted far away from art itself—it has become an industry and a trade. If you want to promote a painter, you have to buy off those art critics, writers, and collectors, deliberately bid up his paintings at auction, and then write art criticism saying how good his paintings are, seeing this kind of artistic conception or that kind of artistic conception in them, claiming he has pioneered a school or represents a certain school. These methods are truly very effective—those wealthy people who merely pretend to appreciate culture will buy such paintings, because they do not understand paintings at all and can only listen to the appreciation and commentary of art critics.

Here I cannot generalize about all of them; I can only say that the level of most art critics is insufficient. If their level could reach the point of appreciating the true inner content of an artist, then they themselves would be artists and would not need to become art critics. This is my understanding, and it may be wrong—there are also people who are willing to be art critics and not willing to be artists, which is also quite possible.

Only You Can Interpret Your Own Dreams

So as far as dreaming itself is concerned, no one but you can truly know its meaning.

No one knows the true meaning of a dream; only you do. If you read books that tell you a certain object in a dream always represents a certain type of meaning, such as The Duke of Zhou's Dream Dictionary¹⁵, then you are like someone accepting an art critic's interpretation of the symbols in your own painting—as if he understands your painting better than you do.

Dreams are the same. You should not accept other people's explanations and interpretations of your dreams; only you can interpret them. The reason you feel unfamiliar with your own dreams is that you try to make them follow a pattern that is not your own. You use other people's ways to understand your own dreams, so of course you recognize them even less and do not know what the meaning within them is.

In any case, when you try to consciously assess the meaning of a dream, the interpretation involves only a portion of the dream's function.

When you deliberately analyze the meaning of a dream, the interpretation involves only a small part of the dream's function. Because at the time of dreaming, the real function of the dream has already taken place on the psychological and physiological levels. Hormonal changes occur in the body, and psychologically you are allowed to try experiencing things that you do not normally experience in ordinary reality. In such experiences you can have a renewed experience or new ideas. These psychological and physiological changes already happened at the time of the dream. Analyzing afterward what meaning and influence the dream had for you is no longer of use—its function has already been completed. Remember, the function of the dream is already completed at the time you are dreaming.

The events in dreams affect your entire bodily state.

The events in dreams affect your entire bodily state, and therefore have a continuous healing effect. It is continuous; it is not just for a little while. Its influence on you is continuous.

This is from the psychological setting that is set up in the drama of any dream.

In any dream there is a set psychological setting, and within that setting your own problems and challenges are resolved. You first set up a psychological scenario in your mind, or design a scene, a stage set, a plot, and within that setting your problems and challenges are resolved.

You adopt many possible actions, and these actions are projected into possible futures. Because every thought of yours has already been projected out, has already been produced. It may not have happened in your present reality world, but in another reality world it has already happened. In dreams you are already constructing your future—not the future of this reality of yours, but perhaps the future in other possible worlds.

As you gradually learn the nature of your beliefs, you can learn to use the dream state more effectively for your own conscious purposes.

When you understand the nature of beliefs, you can learn to use the dream state more effectively, to actively make use of the dream. This is one of the most effective natural therapies.

And the inner framework in which your physical formation largely takes place.

The process of your physical body's formation, for the most part, actually takes place within processes similar to the dream state. To put it in poetic language: your body is formed in your dreams, or in a state like dreaming—you first form the dream image of your body, and then it becomes manifest in this physical world.

Jane's pace has been very steady. The mention of probabilities here reminded me of something, because Seth again brought up the question of probabilities here. In Chapter 16 of Seth Speaks¹⁶, Seth said something I particularly liked. He said that every mental act—every mental thought—opens up a genuinely new dimension, a new dimensional space, a new parallel universe, or a new world. In a certain way, your most insignificant thought gives birth to new worlds. This is consistent with many viewpoints in Buddhism: every thought of yours produces a new world. Bodhisattvas also often say that in the snap of a finger there are some three hundred million thoughts¹⁷, and every thought becomes real.

Drugs and Natural Healing

Here, I want to point out that some of the drugs given to psychiatric patients more or less block the healing function of dreams.

The drugs we ordinarily prescribe for psychiatric patients all block the healing function of dreams, and they also block the self-healing function that dreams perform on the self.

One more point must be considered regarding medicine: if you have accepted the beliefs of Western medicine, then I do not suggest that you suddenly throw away all your doctors.

If you have accepted the viewpoint of Western medicine since childhood, I do not suggest that you throw away all your doctors.

But if you do not ignore any chemical imbalance in the body, when we resolve the inner problem that caused the chemical imbalance through a natural healing method, it will correct itself naturally.

After you resolve the problem that caused the chemical imbalance, it will correct itself naturally. What he means is that if you cannot fully achieve trust in this natural healing method, then you still cannot completely abandon Western medicine. But what he is telling you is that natural healing is extremely important throughout your entire life and in the process of the body's recovery. Because when you resolve the problem of this imbalance, it will naturally balance itself.

This new balance tells the physical body that an inner problem has been resolved.

Then the body, your body, the psyche, body, psyche, and spirit operate in a somewhat harmonious fashion.

Your body, psyche, and spirit become harmonious. And when the challenges of the psyche begin anew — you have reached a state of balance, but at this time you will have new challenges, because your consciousness is constantly creating and challenging new things — then another round of natural healing takes place rhythmically: imbalance begins again, and at this time the automatic self-healing process begins a new round.

However, when the physical imbalance is resolved through the use of drugs, the body's signals will say: the inner difficulty must also have been taken care of, although it may not have been resolved at all.

When you resolve it with drugs, your body will give some signals — hormonal responses, chemical substances — telling you that the inner difficulty has also been taken care of, that is, the inner belief that caused the imbalance has also been resolved. But in fact it has not been resolved at all; you have only temporarily gotten better.

The entire organism, in this case, has not achieved unity on its own.

Your entire body and psyche have not achieved a very good unity, so this problem still exists.

When the problem manifests in a certain way, and then drugs block the normal expression of this illness of the psyche — because the expression of the illness of the psyche is its way of showing you: you are not unified, you are not aligned with yourself. This illness, or negative emotion, is only a signal; it wants to express that you are not unified. But if you block it with drugs, then your psyche will seek other ways to express itself. If other expressions are also blocked by the same drug-based methods, then the entire body-psyche relationship will become alienated from itself.

This is very much like the sub-health state that we humans have already entered: your life, your work, all kinds of emotions are already very wrong, your body is already flashing red lights everywhere, but you suppress it by taking medicine and all kinds of health supplements, and you remain in a state of tense, repressed work. At this time your problem has not been resolved at all — the unresolved state means you will live very uncomfortably and unhappily, you do not even recognize yourself, you do not know what you are doing every day, why you are so busy and working so hard every day.

The inner mechanism is disturbed. Because not only has that basic challenge not been faced, you have repeatedly refused to give it substantive expression. Illness is a form of expression; you do not let it speak, you do not resolve it. If left alone, this substantive expression will bring about a natural resolution — you just need to let it express itself. Psychological problems, the causes of imbalance, have an outlet for release; let it release. If you do not let it release, it will find other channels to release through.

Although there are many details here, because at this point each person differs, the problems become too complex to generalize.

For example, in your society, your own belief system must also be taken into consideration.

Your own belief system must also be taken into consideration. If you do not believe in natural healing, you will naturally block its occurrence, and this natural healing will be of no use. But if you also do not go to see a doctor — you neither believe in natural healing nor trust doctors — then the fear in your heart will cause even more problems. The most dangerous state is that of half-belief, half-doubt.

On the other hand:

If you have faith in the help of medicine, then this belief will bring you healing effects.

If you have faith in Western medicine, if you believe in it, this belief will bring you the power of healing. Ultimately what heals you is this faith, not the drug itself — this is the most essential point. If the inner problem is not dealt with, the above situations will only work to a certain extent — to a certain degree, conventional medicine is useful.

Usually those illnesses will be resolved automatically, regardless of what you did or what you believed.

Regardless of what you do, what you did, or what you believe, many illnesses will resolve automatically. Why? Because you have tremendous creative power, as well as an automatic regulatory system of the body that you were born with.

Many people will say that doctors actually cannot cure very serious illnesses. Some illnesses will get better even if you do not treat them, and some illnesses even doctors cannot cure. In other words, illnesses that can be cured without a doctor's treatment, doctors can also treat; illnesses that even doctors cannot cure can only be cured by yourself. Take the simplest example, the common cold — do you think it is an illness? Are doctors of any use for the common cold today? No use. Even today we still have no way to deal with the common cold; we can only prevent it by getting flu vaccines. For an ordinary cold, doctors can only prescribe some medicine to relieve the symptoms — nasal congestion, runny nose, headache, body aches — but doctors will tell you: it will get better naturally in about seven days or so¹⁸, no need to worry about it.

The same is true when we face this novel coronavirus; even today we still have no specific medicine to treat it. Some people eventually recovered, but in fact it was still through the body's own self-regulation and the ability of their own immune system to subdue the virus and recover on their own. To this day there is still no specific medicine, whether it is remdesivir or other drugs, including what was mentioned a couple of days ago, dexamethasone — a type of corticosteroid hormone drug — these things all help you, but the most important thing is still yourself.

Mental Illness

The same also applies to mental conditions. Besides physical problems, the same is true of the mind.

Sometimes the absence of professional treatment can resolve problems better than professional treatment would.

Human beings themselves have this kind of error-correcting ability, the capacity for self-recovery, for maintaining their own health and balance. The same is true mentally.

A recent idea is that certain mental conditions are caused by chemical imbalances in the body.

Many scientific views today still hold this belief, that certain mental illnesses occur because some of the hormones secreted in your body differ from other people's. Take depression, for example: it is believed to be caused by certain substances being secreted differently from normal people. Taking certain medications can indeed bring about partial improvement -- suppressing what is too high, or supplementing what is too low. On the surface, there really can be a very significant improvement.

Actually, such chemical imbalances do not cause any illness. It is your beliefs about the nature of your reality that cause illness.

Because your beliefs about the nature of reality, your belief system, cause your illness. That kind of medication can improve the immediate situation, but the inner problem of belief still needs to be resolved -- it treats the symptoms but not the root cause. If you do not resolve the inner problem of belief, another illness will take its place. That is why there are so many typical cases -- some cancers recur very frequently. We often say that a person has a cancer-prone constitution or a cancer-prone personality. One person's cancer is cured, then it recurs several years later, while in others it never recurs. Modern medicine finds it very hard to explain this, and can only fall back on the phrase "individual differences."

When you are surrounded by the belief that some drug, or food, or doctor will provide you with the answer, then it is very difficult for you to solve your problems in a natural way.

When you are surrounded by this kind of idea, it becomes very hard for you to solve your problems through natural healing methods.

Therefore, in a society where the masses hold an opposite concept, those who try to allow themselves to benefit from natural healing abilities must often face the pressure of doubting whether they are wrong.

When the masses all hold the view that medicine and doctors are what work, those who try to heal themselves through natural healing abilities must face the entire society's denial of them. Others will say, you can cure illness without taking medicine? Then you must be in a cult -- only cults would say such a thing. You do not dare, so are you not caught in a dilemma?

Seth's point is that you either believe in one side or the other, but whatever you do, do not remain wavering in the middle. If you truly believe Western medicine works, then Western medicine really will work for you. If you truly believe one hundred percent in natural healing, then natural healing will also work for you. It is that simple.

Unfortunately, the more you depend upon exterior methods, the more it seems you must depend upon them, and the less you trust your own natural abilities.

The more you depend on them, the less you believe in your own abilities. You do not feel that you have the ability to heal yourself.

You often become sensitive to a certain drug.

Sometimes a person becomes allergic to a certain drug. Because the body understands: if you accept that drug, then all the solutions to that particular problem will be cut off. That illness was there precisely to make you find your own solution, but through the drug you temporarily suppress the illness, so the path to finding your own solution is cut off, or another more serious illness will arise because of the "cover-up" of this dilemma. So you develop an allergic reaction to this drug, which prevents you from using it. This is the body's natural ability.

Therefore, in your society, natural healing can hardly achieve its full effect. Why? Because there is too much interference -- after you are born, your surrounding environment, the world, and people all interfere with you. Although you interfere with it, natural healing is still operating, and you can always direct it to bring health and vitality to the present physical body.

Mental illness often points to the nature of your beliefs, and where they agree or conflict with the beliefs of others.

Mental illness points out the nature of your beliefs, telling you where your beliefs have gone wrong. When we say a person has a mental illness, he is certainly different from normal people. These similarities and differences are what we often call the symptoms of mental illness.

The belief systems of some mentally ill people differ so significantly from the beliefs of society that their behavior shows marked differences from that of ordinary people.

Because his beliefs are different, his behavior differs from that of ordinary people.

As with many physical illnesses, mental illness has certain crisis points, and if left alone, a person may be able to achieve a spontaneous resolution.

Seth does not speak in absolutes. If this kind of mental illness has certain crisis points, and you do not use traditional psychiatric treatment methods -- chemical drugs, electroshock -- it may resolve on its own.

Even in cases of so-called mental illness, it is important to understand the body, just as it is important to understand the individual's beliefs about his own body, its relationship with others, and its relationship with time and space.

In treating mental illness, you cannot ignore physical considerations or physical beliefs. If the person also understands the body well -- his own body, his relationship with others, and his beliefs about time and space -- then the treatment of mental illness must be addressed from multiple directions at the same time.

In such cases, there is often a chemical imbalance. This is unconsciously created by the person, not intentionally. Sometimes it is done so that he can produce a series of hallucinations, to maintain this kind of objective dream -- that is, hallucination, dreaming while awake. This requires a chemical reaction different from that of normal waking consciousness. So the chemical substances in his body really are different from those of normal people.

The important thing is that whether he adopts a mental or physical illness, his choice has its reasons, and it is a natural method. At the same time, the person knows that his body and mind have the means to deal with it.

Speaking of this kind of objective dream and hallucination, if you have had such a patient in your family, or have been in contact with such a person, you will know: he really does produce hallucinations. For example, when watching television, he cannot distinguish reality from what is on screen -- when a war movie is playing, he will suddenly stand up and salute; when watching a tiger in an animal documentary, he will feel that the tiger is really about to leap out and bite him to death, and he will be extremely terrified. What seems ridiculous to you is real to him. Some people feel that someone is trying to assassinate them, that a secret organization is trying to kill them, and they run around everywhere, frantically running through the streets, and no one can hold them back. In his world, there really is a group of people hunting him down every day. This is real to him, and you must understand him. To maintain this series of hallucinations, the chemical substances in his body must be different from those of normal people, otherwise he could not sustain this continuous hallucination -- this is what Seth tells you. But what he tells you is that whether a person chooses to be mentally ill or physically ill, he has his own reasons, and this itself is a natural method. He knows that this physical or mental illness will eventually be handled well by himself.

Differences in personality have a great deal to do with which kind of illness a person adopts -- mental illness or physical illness, or what kind of damage is done to his living statue.

Now, the inner problems you encounter are always constructive, leading you to greater challenges.

Your making yourself ill in this way is because you are facing certain inner problems. These inner problems are always constructive -- you must remember this -- you must be grateful for your illness. This illness is a challenge that leads you to greater achievement. Without this illness, you would not see this problem. Once you discover this problem, it becomes a greater challenge for you, allowing you to move to a higher level.

For example, a problem caused by guilt is physically materialized as an illness. Its purpose is to lead you to face and overcome the idea of guilt, to make you face the root of this guilt.

The body itself is always in a state of change.

The body is always changing. You think that it reaches some peak and then begins to decline, or becomes worse, because you do not understand that it is an expression of your existence through the physical body. We feel that after the body reaches its optimal state in youth, it begins to decline and become worse and worse, and that is why we begin to get sick -- this is your belief: when you get old, you naturally get sick.

This expression reflects the seasons of the earth and the flesh, yet the body reflects with great faithfulness the self that you know yourself to be.

The body is a very faithful reflection, truthfully reflecting what you think you are -- whatever you think you are, the body becomes that. In old age it does the same thing, still reflecting your state of mind, how you perceive yourself.

And shows the you that is presently in the flesh, including the times of your entry into and departure from the body.

Including your birth and your death -- that is, when you incarnate and when you die -- each has its own individuality, completely different. Here you can see great differences. He also discussed this in Seth Speaks: each person's birth and each person's death are both marked by great differences, composed of his individuality.

Of course, for many different reasons, many people stop creating their bodies and die at a young age. Some people die prematurely because they believe that old age is shameful, and that only a young body is beautiful.

Therefore, your beliefs about age will affect the body and all of its abilities.

Remember this sentence. As we mentioned earlier in Chapter Six of this book:

You may become hard of hearing because you firmly believe that this must come with age.

You believe that hearing deteriorates with age. If you firmly believe this, then it really will cause you to become hard of hearing.

Throughout the various periods of your life, you believe that the body's activity must decrease with age.

You believe this about yourself; this is your belief. Based on this belief, you therefore change the chemical composition of your body, and then you really do become old and useless. It is that subtle, and that simple.

The elements, chemicals, cells, molecules, and atoms -- these parts make up your living statue.

What makes up your statue are molecules, atoms, cells, chemicals, and elements, but it is you who direct them through your conscious beliefs. You use your conscious beliefs to direct the activity of these atoms, molecules, and cells, and this activity itself activates all the great creativity that gives your body "life."

And it ensures that the body constantly reflects the self you think you are. If you think you are old and useless, then it really becomes old and useless. If you think that life at fifty or sixty has just begun, that the best times have only just arrived, then your body will be very good, as healthy as a young person's.

Closing

After a very impassioned delivery, Seth said loudly with a smile: End of session. He was very close to the end of this chapter.

Session 642

We see the final ending, which is the next session, very short, really just a beginning:

We will see in the next chapter that you can very effectively call upon the body's natural healing. We will discuss the methods by which this can be encouraged, and the role played by the conscious mind as the director of the soul clothed in chemical garments.

This is the issue to be discussed in the next chapter. At this point, Chapter Ten has come to a complete end.

注释与核实

1. Source: Ministry of Justice National Legal Database, Narcotics Hazard Prevention Act (https://law.moj.gov.tw/LawClass/LawAll.aspx?PCode=C0000008) ↩

2. According to Mike's original words, "In many U.S. states, recreational marijuana is already legal. But under federal law, possession of marijuana is still illegal and a felony"; upon verification, it should be "Under federal law, possession of marijuana is indeed still illegal, but a first offense of 'simple possession' (21 U.S.C. § 844) carries a maximum penalty of one year in prison and a fine of at least $1,000, making it a misdemeanor rather than a felony." (Source: Congressional Research Service (CRS), The Federal Status of Marijuana and the Policy Gap with States, https://www.congress.gov/crs-product/IF12270) ↩

3. Source: Hui-Lin Li, An archaeological and historical account of cannabis in China (Economic Botany, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/BF02862859) ↩

4. According to Mike's original words, "In Singapore, I think possession of 5 grams or some amount of heroin leads directly to the death penalty"; upon verification, it should be "Singapore's Misuse of Drugs Act stipulates the death penalty only for trafficking (including import, export, and manufacturing) of more than 15 grams of heroin (diamorphine), not for possession of 5 grams; simple possession itself does not carry the death penalty, but possession of more than 2 grams is presumed to be trafficking." (Source: Attorney-General's Chambers, Singapore Statutes Online, Misuse of Drugs Act, https://sso.agc.gov.sg/Act/MDA1973) ↩

5. According to Mike's original words, "In mainland China as well, possession of more than a few grams of heroin, as I recall, also directly leads to the death penalty"; upon verification, it should be "In mainland China, simple 'illegal possession' of heroin does not carry the death penalty: under Article 348 of the Criminal Law, illegal possession of 10 grams or more but less than 50 grams of heroin is punishable by up to three years in prison (three to seven years if the circumstances are serious), and possession of 50 grams or more is punishable by seven years or more in prison or life imprisonment, with life imprisonment as the statutory maximum; the death penalty applies only to the crimes of smuggling, trafficking, transporting, and manufacturing drugs under Article 347, and only when heroin amounts to 50 grams or more, and it is not mandatory, while a few grams of heroin falls far short of that threshold." (Source: National People's Congress, Criminal Law of the People's Republic of China (published in the Gazette of the Supreme People's Court), http://gongbao.court.gov.cn/Details/96fea4e0b9e00def2295a1e598666f.html) ↩

6. Source: Wikipedia, N,N-Dimethyltryptamine (https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/N,N-%E4%BA%8C%E7%94%B2%E5%9F%BA%E8%89%B2%E8%83%BA) ↩

7. Source: Wikipedia, Zhu Guangqian (https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/%E6%9C%B1%E5%85%89%E6%BD%9C) ↩

8. Source: Hector Berlioz, Mémoires, Chapter 39 (http://www.hberlioz.com/Writings/HBM39.htm) ↩

9. According to Mike's original words, "The author of The Sorrows of Young Werther said he himself did not know how the novel came about. Suddenly one day, when he saw a news item about a young man's suicide—he only saw such a news item, without seeing any actual scene—his inspiration suddenly came, and he himself said it was like a light illuminating my consciousness. Then the entire plot of the novel and the structure of the whole text all came out at once, and he wrote the entire novel in one breath in only two weeks. After finishing it, when he looked back at The Sorrows of Young Werther, he could not believe he had written it himself, and felt as if it had come from nowhere."; upon verification, it should be "The Sorrows of Young Werther was not written in two weeks: Goethe completed the book in about five and a half weeks of concentrated writing between January and March 1774 (his own account in Poetry and Truth says four weeks)." (Source: Wikipedia, The Sorrows of Young Werther, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Sorrows_of_Young_Werther) ↩

10. This claim could not be verified. ↩

11. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, The Red Book = Liber Novus | work by Jung (https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Red-Book-Liber-Novus) ↩

12. Source: Wikipedia, Esther Hicks (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Esther_Hicks) ↩

13. Source: Religions (MDPI), The Daoist Art of the Bedchamber of Male Homosexuality in Ming and Qing Literature (https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/15/7/841) ↩

14. This claim could not be verified. ↩

15. Source: Wikipedia, Zhou Gong's Dream Interpretation (https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/%E5%91%A8%E5%85%AC%E8%A7%A3%E6%A2%A6) ↩

16. Source: Jane Roberts, Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul (https://www.thesethhouse.org/seth-quotes/) ↩

17. According to Mike's original words, "In the snap of a finger, how many hundreds of millions of thoughts"; upon verification, it should be "In the Bodhisattva Womb Sutra, Maitreya Bodhisattva says, 'In the time of a finger snap, there are thirty-two hundred thousand million thoughts, each thought taking form, and each form possessing consciousness,' meaning one finger snap contains thirty-two hundred thousand million thoughts, not three hundred million thoughts." (Source: Translated by Zhu Fonian, Bodhisattva Womb Sutra, https://zh.wikisource.org/zh-hans/%E8%8F%A9%E8%96%A9%E8%99%95%E8%83%8E%E7%B6%93) ↩

18. Source: Mayo Clinic, Common cold — Symptoms and causes (https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-conditions/common-cold/symptoms-causes/syc-20351605) ↩