The "Introduction" and "Chapter Highlights" of this chapter were summarized by an AI editor based on the main text below; they are not things Mike said during the lecture. The main text comes from Mike's commentary, and the blockquotes are Seth's original words (the portions Mike read aloud).
Guide
As the closing chapter of the book, this chapter points out the practical methods for improving your life: accept and trust your present condition, seeing it as a necessary part of the direction of development; find the beliefs behind feelings of worthlessness and list your abilities and achievements; do not compare yourself with others, and begin acting from your present circumstances; examine and adjust beliefs that have become outdated with age; do not make seeking help a habit, and do not look outside yourself for the answers to your life; affirm yourself, trust your own feelings, and use your beliefs to create your own reality.
Key Points of This Chapter
- Accept and trust your present state, treating it as a necessary part of the direction of development.
- Behind feelings of worthlessness there are specific beliefs; you should find the reasons and list your abilities and achievements, rather than just pasting on positive beliefs.
- Do not compare yourself with others; start acting from your present conditions.
- Beliefs become outdated with age and circumstances; they need to be examined and adjusted, and old beliefs should not continue to be held.
- Do not seek life's answers outside yourself or rely on others to confirm your worth; you should affirm yourself and trust your own feelings.
Main Text
Background
The final chapter of The Nature of Personal Reality, Chapter Twenty-Two, is titled "You Improve Your Life, and the New Beliefs." The content we will cover in this chapter begins with Session 676, which took place on Monday evening, July 9, 1973.
That evening at 9:15 we were ready for the session. It was another very hot night, and the fan was on, but at a low speed so it would not be too noisy -- actually we rarely used it. At the end of the previous session, Seth had given Jane the title of the next chapter, so that she would know what he was doing and what he would cover next, to give her confidence.
Loving Your Present Self
Seth said that if you have a loving respect for yourself, then you will trust your own direction -- you must believe in the direction you are moving, the direction of your development; this is something you absolutely must do. You will accept your present position: the environmental state you are in right now, your current circumstances -- you must respect it and accept it, no matter what it is.
Many people will say: Of course, when things are good, when everything is going smoothly, I can accept it; but when I am in a very unfavorable state, why should I accept it? So Seth specifically emphasized that no matter what state you are in, you must accept your present position -- I think the word "position" here should be the word "position," meaning the place where you are right now. Treat it as part of that direction: you must believe in the direction of your development, and you should regard the state you are in right now as one of the necessary processes you must pass through in your future development. And realize that all the creative elements you need can come from it -- "it" is your present state, your current condition. You must know that the ideals you want to realize are all generated from this present state of yours. In other words, the present state is a necessary process on the road of your future development.
Session 676
If you have a loving respect for yourself, then you will trust your own direction. You will accept your present position, whatever it is, as part of that direction, and realize that all the creative elements you need can come from it. (Session 676)
Be Yourself, and Trust Your Own Integrity
Be yourself, and trust your own integrity -- and integrity includes what you yourself consider good, or what you yourself consider bad. All of it is yours, and you must acknowledge the integrity of all of it. Then you will automatically help others, because you trust your own integrity. Trust yourself, love yourself, and you will do things that help others.
Seth repeatedly suggests that we repeat affirmations like this: "I am a worthy person, and I trust my own integrity." But he also reminds us: if you merely repeat such words with your mouth, it is not of much use -- if at the same time you are afraid of your own emotions. Earlier you were suggesting to yourself, reinforcing yourself, saying I am a worthy person, I trust my own integrity; but in the actual process, when you encounter a state of mind or an emotion that you do not like, you begin to get upset: "How can I still be like this? How can such emotions still come out? How can I still be dejected, depressed, idle, lacking confidence in myself? How can I still have a sense of worthlessness?" All of these things make you unhappy. You think these things should all be gone -- but thinking they should be gone is denying your own integrity. If it comes out, that proves it is there. If it is there, you must accept it, not deny it.
Be yourself, and trust your own integrity, and then you will automatically help others. (Session 676)
Seth gave an analogy: just as lovers, in the object of their love, can see the ideal -- what he sees is his future expectation for his partner; at the same time he can also see those shortcomings, see certain deviations from the idealization. He knows the gap between reality and the ideal: the young man he now loves is not yet as mature, steady, and successful as he imagined; he may still be playing games, still full of youthful anger, still immature. Even so, you still love yourself. And you realize that what you consider imperfection is actually a kind of groping toward greater perfection -- the state you currently consider not in line with the ideal is in fact a process of constant exploration, a process of transformation into the more complete self you imagine.
You cannot love yourself and at the same time hate the emotions that flow through you. You cannot say you love yourself on the one hand, and hate those emotions in you on the other. So what exactly is the relationship between these emotions and you? Seth says, although you are not your emotions -- this is something you must pay attention to -- you identify with them so often that when you hate them, you hate yourself. Emotions are emotions, and you are you, but because we over-identify with emotions and feelings, in real life, when we hate that emotion, hate that feeling, it turns into hating ourselves.
Although you are not your emotions, you identify with them so often that when you hate them, you hate yourself. (Session 676)
Finding the Reasons Behind Feelings of Worthlessness
Seth teaches us a concrete method. Use your conscious mind and its logic -- use your thoughts, your reasoning ability -- if you find yourself feeling worthless, then do not simply try to place a more positive belief on top of this belief of worthlessness; instead, find the reasons for your belief that you are worthless. If you have not done so, have not looked for its reasons, have not dug deep into the roots of this belief, then write down your own feelings, and be completely honest. If another person asked you in the same way, what would you say? Write down everything you would explain, examine what you have written, and then realize: it involves a whole set of beliefs.
There is a difference between believing that you are worthless and actually being worthless. More often, we believe we are worthless, rather than actually being worthless.
However, make a list of your abilities and accomplishments -- this is a task we need to do, and you can treat it as an exercise. List all of your abilities and accomplishments, and these should include the following facts: getting along with others very well and very appropriately; being attractive; being good to plants or animals; being a good carpenter, cook, or tailor -- any talents and accomplishments should be recorded truthfully, just as you previously recorded the most minute flaws.
If you find yourself feeling worthless, then do not simply try to place a more positive belief on top of this belief of worthlessness; instead, find the reasons for your belief that you are worthless. If you have not done so, then write down your own feelings, and be completely honest. If another person told you the same thing in the same way, then what would you say? Examine what you have written, and then realize that it involves a set of beliefs. There is a difference between believing that you are worthless and actually being worthless. However, make a list of your abilities and accomplishments, and these should include the following facts, such as getting along with others very well, being attractive, being good to plants or animals, or being a good carpenter, cook, or tailor. Any talents and accomplishments should be recorded truthfully, just as you previously recorded the most minute flaws. (Session 676)
No one, in his or her own way, is without some creative abilities -- no one is without creativity, without accomplishments, or without some excellent personal characteristics and strengths. Therefore, if you follow these instructions, you will find that you are indeed a person of value. When you find yourself sinking into a mood of inferiority, then look at the list of abilities and accomplishments you have made, and support yourself with positive suggestions about your own worth that are backed up by your personal self-examination.
Don't Compare Yourself with Others
After doing this exercise, you may still say: I know I have great abilities that I haven't used, but when I compare myself with others, I feel far behind; if I have a few worldly achievements that many others also have, that's not unique, so what use is that? Clearly my destiny involves more than that, and I have longings I can't express.
Seth analyzes this kind of thinking: You must understand that you have your own uniqueness. Comparing yourself with others is of no use whatsoever, because in doing so, you try to imitate those traits and strengths that belong to them, and to that extent, you deny your own miraculous existence and prototype. To put it more bluntly: when you imitate others' strengths and others' specialties, you ignore your own strengths and specialties; even more bluntly, to some degree, you are living other people's lives, rather than truly facing yourself and living your own life.
Moreover, once you start comparing yourself with others, it never ends. When you were little, it was the neighbor's kid -- your mother often compared you with other children; when you grew up, your mother stopped comparing you, but you started comparing yourself, with colleagues, classmates, friends, people you know and people you don't. You will always find that some people are more talented than you in certain areas. "Beyond every mountain there is a person, beyond every person there is a mountain; beyond every heaven there is another heaven" -- there will always be people better than you. Therefore you will continue to be dissatisfied: the moment you reach one achievement, you discover that someone even more outstanding has appeared.
You must understand that you have your own uniqueness. Comparing yourself with others is of no use whatsoever, because in doing so, you try to imitate the traits and strengths that belong to them, and to that extent, you deny your own miraculous existence and prototype. (Session 676)
Conversely, by working with your own beliefs, take it for granted that your life is important -- simply regard your life as important, as a matter of course. Not one minute of yours is wasted, not one day of yours is meaningless; in this unique life that belongs to you, every day has its value and meaning.
Start from where you are, from the environment and position you are in right now. Don't aim too high and imagine yourself as an overbearing CEO going out to build a career in a position you could never possibly occupy. You can only start from your current position -- your current financial situation, interpersonal relationships, social environment -- as your starting point, your fulcrum. Don't mock yourself because you haven't reached the thoughts of certain great people; use the talents you already have to the best of your ability, and don't keep looking at the things you don't have. Understand that within them lies the potential for your personal fulfillment. You need to understand: it is your personal fulfillment, and it has nothing to do with others. In becoming who you are, what does that have to do with other people? You're not trying to become someone else.
Any help you give to others will come through the creative use of your own characteristics, not those of others -- when you help others, you must use your strengths and your advantages, not your weaknesses.
Learning to Handle Negative Emotions
When you find yourself dwelling on negative issues in your life, do not get angry at yourself -- always remember that. Instead, constructively ask yourself: Why am I doing this? The final answer will always come.
When you face a negative life situation, when you feel very low, very dejected, when you are at a low point in life, do not get angry at yourself at this time. You should think: Why am I in this state? Is this not a kind of challenge, a kind of opportunity for me? Is it not the case that only by being forced this way can my abilities be stimulated? When you face any challenge in life, and you look back after a period of time, you will find that the insults, humiliations, contempt, suppression, crushing, and exclusion you experienced at the time were all a kind of accomplishment for you -- they were building you up. Without being stimulated in this way, you would not have been able to rouse yourself. You may say no, you can just give yourself a pep talk -- but try it when the time comes and you will know. Many people achieve completion precisely under this kind of stimulation.
Use that knowledge as a bridge: use the answer you get from asking yourself -- "Why is my current state like this, why has this situation appeared" -- as a bridge. Whatever emotions you have, let them happen, just let them happen. Whether it is heartbreak, low spirits, dejection, sadness, lack of fighting will, or depression, they are all emotions -- just let them happen. If you do this honestly, your feelings of worthlessness or discouragement will pass through -- they will pass on their own and disappear. One emotion will lead into another, and it will change on its own. You may even find yourself impatient with these situations themselves: with these negative emotions that have come again and again, that have already appeared many times in your life, you yourself are quite annoyed -- "Why is this here again?" You may even be tired of these emotions.
However, do not automatically tell yourself that they are wrong, and do not try to stick positive beliefs on them like band-aids. Many people's approach is this: when a bad emotion comes, they feel that this thing is bad, that it is wrong, so they give it a positive belief to cover it up. But when you cover it up, it is like sticking a band-aid on it -- then it cannot leave. You have to let it leave. Just being in this emotional state is fine.
Have a sense of humor about yourself -- not a malicious, mocking sense of humor, but a kind-hearted humorous respect -- a kind-hearted humorous respect with a certain self-deprecating quality. When high seriousness comes naturally and not by force, it is good. In your life, there are some moments that are very sacred, very serious -- for example, when you consider your future development, when you make plans for your future career, you will have a very serious feeling, and this is good. But if you deliberately stretch out this serious state, thinking, "This sacred moment is very good, I want to keep maintaining this positive, righteous attitude," when seriousness is deliberately stretched out by you, it will become somewhat affected, and that is not good.
When you find yourself dwelling on negative issues in your life, do not get angry at yourself. Instead, constructively ask yourself why you are doing this. The final answer will always come. When you do this honestly, your feelings of worthlessness or discouragement will pass through and disappear. Do not automatically tell yourself that they are wrong, or try to stick positive beliefs on them like a band-aid. Have a sense of humor about yourself. When high seriousness comes naturally and not by force, it is good. (Session 676)
Different Periods Require Different Beliefs
If you allow yourself to become more and more aware of your beliefs, you can deal with them. Trying to fight against beliefs you consider negative, or being frightened by them, is foolish behavior. Do not resist those negative beliefs, and do not be frightened by them -- "How can I think I have so little sense of worth? How can I have so little confidence? How can I have no sense of security?" Do not be afraid of any of these things. Just treat them like the arrival of a kind of weather; it cannot be sunny every day. These beliefs and these emotions are not mysterious. Do not bother with them.
You may find that they once served a very good purpose, only they were overemphasized. What they may need is to be deconstructed and reorganized, rather than being crudely negated. Some beliefs may have had a very positive effect on you during a certain period of your life, yet because you did not examine them, you may still be carrying them after they have served their purpose, and now they may be working against you -- this belief has become outdated.
For example, many children at a certain stage believe that their parents are all-powerful. This is a very convenient belief. In childhood, such a belief arises naturally and gives children a sense of security. If a child did not trust that his parents were all-powerful, how could he have that tremendous trust and sense of security toward his family and his parents? But when they enter adolescence and their teenage years, these children are shocked to discover that their parents are also quite human, just like ordinary people, and capable of making mistakes. Often another belief takes its place.
What is this new belief? It is the belief in the inadequacy and inferiority of the older generation -- they feel that old people, including their own parents, are outdated, that their beliefs are too old-fashioned and no longer necessary, that they have become a kind of historical garbage or something reactionary. And there is also the belief in the rigidity and callousness of those who run the world -- they feel that these old people are still managing the country, still serving as officials and leaders at every level, and that they are no good, their beliefs are no good, they have no vitality, none of the drive of young people, they are too rigid and too pedantic. This is a belief that many young people often hold during adolescence or late adolescence.
This belief releases them from the childish notion that "older people are always right and cannot make mistakes" -- they always swing from one extreme to the other. This gives them a challenge in overcoming personal and worldly problems: when they discover that not a single one of their parents' ideas is right, they must establish their own belief system to replace it. Before, all they had to do was listen to their parents; their parents were all-powerful and everything they said was right, so being obedient and well-behaved was enough. After adolescence, they discover that this is not the case, and they feel that everything their parents do is wrong. This belief then becomes useful -- it helps them establish their own beliefs. If they have not yet replaced this belief, if they still insist that their parents are always right, then they become mama's boys or mama's girls. Whether it is a mama's boy or a mama's girl, the principle is the same.
For a while, new adults -- that is, people in adolescence and just entering adulthood -- often feel that they themselves are invincible, that they are capable of anything, even transcending the limits of animal nature, transcending biological limits. This belief is useful at that stage: if a person in his twenties did not have such ambition and drive, he would not dare to face life, would not dare to open up his own world. Many people ask why more and more young people nowadays are refusing to leave the nest and unwilling to face society. There are many reasons, and one of them is that these people lack this kind of fighting spirit. They do not have that ambition that transcends the limits of animal nature. They do not feel that they are invincible. They feel that they are too small and too weak, and they prematurely adopt that worldly-wise, smooth social experience, thinking it is a kind of wisdom -- but it is not. At this age, they should be like a newborn calf that is not afraid of a tiger. That is the belief a newborn calf should have. Moreover, this belief forms the strength and energy needed by your collective world. Our world needs this kind of youthful drive and daring from young people in order to keep moving us forward.
However, in physical terms, once they arrive in the material world, sooner or later they must realize not only the challenge, but also the animal nature and other strange characteristics, within which such general beliefs basically become unreasonable. What Seth says in this bookish way, in plain language, means this: in the face of reality, these overly idealized young people who think they are invincible finally come to realize that they are also physical beings -- after all, you are mortal. Although we say that by nature you are divine, once you enter physical society to operate, you must abide by the laws of physical society. You are not invincible. You are limited by the body; your energy and abilities are finite. When you are sleepy, you must sleep; when you are hungry, you must eat; when you are tired, you must rest.
If you still believe at age forty that your parents never make mistakes, then you have held onto that belief far beyond the period in which it was beneficial to you -- that belief has turned from beneficial to harmful. What is a forty-year-old who still treats his parents' words as the supreme directive every day? That is a forty-year-old giant baby. Seth teaches you to look for the reason behind this belief: go find out why you are still holding onto a belief you should have held in childhood at age forty. Because it will prevent you from exercising your own independence, and it will also prevent you from creating and building your own world. If your parents tell you to take the civil service exam, you take the civil service exam. If your parents tell you to join a state-owned enterprise, you join a state-owned enterprise. If your parents tell you to work in a stable unit, you work in a stable unit -- those are your parents' demands and your parents' beliefs. Are they yours? What do you yourself think?
If you still believe at age fifty that the older generation is rigid -- you could think that when you were young, because a person in his twenties would be wrong not to think that way. If people in their twenties all believed that old people are very wise and have a lot of life experience, and that we should not go out and pioneer or create anything new, and should just listen to these old people's advice and guidance for our lives, would that work? Young people cannot have that belief. They have to feel that old people are no good, that old things are no good, that the decrepit are no good, and that they will be eliminated by history. This belief is normal and correct at their age. But if you still have this idea at age fifty, saying that old things are all no good and that people become rigid when they get old, then that is bad. And then you will quickly turn into a state of senility -- you yourself become an old person, with spiritual incapacity and physical degeneration, and you yourself begin to degenerate. You hold an old idea about the ineffectiveness of the older generation. Your idea was fine in your twenties and thirties, but by now it is outdated, and you are still bringing it into the present to use, so you have established a negative suggestion for yourself, and it has become something bad for you.
If you still believe at age fifty that youth is the only glorious and effective part of life -- often saying things like "You have no idea what I was like when I was young, how I was back then" -- oh my, you live in your own youth every day, and now you are just waiting to die while muddling through. This is of course doing the same thing, just in reverse.
After all this talk, to sum it up in one sentence: we should use whatever beliefs are appropriate at whatever time. Our beliefs will adjust at any time along with our age, environment, and personal state. We should not hold onto one belief from childhood all the way to old age.
Overly Held Beliefs
A young person with a gift in a particular area -- in art, in mathematics, for example -- may believe that this ability makes him superior to everyone else. During a particular period, this belief is helpful to the person involved: he needs this self-confidence, needs this imagination, needs this belief to support him, otherwise he could not have created those achievements. Because this belief provides the necessary thrust for development, as well as the necessary independence in which this ability can grow -- if a person still doubts his own ability, does not dare to believe in it, and is always trembling with fear, how could he ever develop such a unique gift?
But when the same person is a few years older, problems will appear. If a person is a teenage prodigy, it is very good to think this way when he is young; but when he is over thirty and still thinks of himself as a genius, still regards himself as a gifted youth, that is a little strange. Then he consequently denies himself the very important emotional interaction with people of his own age -- he neglects his emotions and other abilities, and his emotional intelligence is relatively low. This belief limits the person's development in other areas.
Let me give another example. A young mother may believe that her child is even more important than her husband. According to the circumstances at the time, when she has just become a mother, this belief can help her give the child the necessary, required attention, and this is very normal. When you have just become a mother, you need exactly this state: my child is more important than anything, I must give him a great deal of attention and energy. But if the child has already grown to two or three years old, and she still holds this idea, feeling that the child is more important than her husband, more important than anyone, then this belief may become extremely limiting -- this viewpoint is outdated.
If a wealthy person has not learned to examine the contents of his own mind, then his entire life may be constructed according to this kind of thought: if he does not engage in self-reflection, does not examine himself, he will treat the child as a lifelong dependency, a kind of emotional anchor. This kind of thing happens a great deal, all over the world, and it is especially obvious in China -- treating the child as the only anchor, and gradually losing interest in the husband as well. A belief that has positive results for a twenty-year-old woman does not necessarily have the same effect for a forty-year-old woman.
Many of your beliefs are culturally determined -- China has traditional culture, but you still only accept those beliefs that are useful for your personal purposes. We will pick out the beliefs from traditional culture that are good for us, and discard the ones that are not good -- this is something we often do.
Generally speaking, in your society, men believe they are logical, while women are considered intuitive and emotional. Now that feminism is on the rise, women try to affirm their own rights, saying that whatever men can do, we can do too, we can also be pilots. But she often falls into the same trap -- only in reverse. What does that mean? It means they try to deny their own supposedly inferior intuitive component, and arm themselves with what they consider the superior logical, rational component. She was originally emphasizing feminism, but the result is the opposite -- she is denying the importance of women's emotional and intuitive qualities. She has accepted the viewpoint of a patriarchal society, believing that women should be more rational, more career-oriented, more professional, but she does not have a correct understanding of her own strengths and characteristics, and without realizing it she has been brainwashed.
Certain beliefs often constitute your life during a particular period, and you have different beliefs constituting you at different stages of development. You will also abandon many of these beliefs as you grow up, and when you do so, the inner structure will also change. Once you recognize this kind of residual, outdated belief, you should no longer respect or cling to it -- it is already outdated, it no longer functions in your present period, it has become something negative.
The Heavy Old Beliefs
Seth says, you may feel inferior because "my mother hated me"; or "I feel worthless because I was small, thin, and pitiful as a child." These beliefs are already outdated. When you deal with beliefs, you may find that the sense of inferiority seems to come from such episodes -- your mother's rejection of you in childhood. But as an adult, you must rely on yourself to turn this belief around. You really were inferior as a child, and it really was caused by your parents' rejection, but that was when you were little. You have grown up now, and your beliefs are entirely yours to decide and determine; you can change them at any time. You cannot say, "No, I cannot change, because my parents already hurt me when I was little" -- you cannot say that.
You need to realize that a mother who hates her child is already in difficulty, and this kind of hatred says more about the mother than it does about the child. When you are an adult, you need to understand that when your mother hated you when you were very small, that was her own problem; that was your mother not doing well. There is no need to keep punishing yourself for your mother's mistake up to now. When you were little, she did not know how to properly raise and treat her own child; that was her failure, and she must have had her own difficulties. We are not making excuses for her, but you can imagine that somewhere in her own belief system something went wrong. When you think this way, you will begin to understand the reason your mother hated you at that time. You must rely on yourself to understand it, and now you are an adult, not a small child who is easy to bully; no one will bully you anymore. So why are you still inferior? Where is the cause?
Seth says, the point of power is in the present -- this passage is in the middle of the book, far from the surrounding sections, so it should be written separately. The point -- the point of power -- is not in the past, unless by your own abject decision you acquiesce to old beliefs that are no longer useful to you. If you no longer accept those old beliefs, you can completely discard them. Your point of power is in the present, not in your past.
If you believe that you are worthless only because you were thin, weak, and easy to bully, then in a certain way, without doubt, you are using that belief for your own purposes. Your present feeling of worthlessness has nothing to do with that childhood belief; you are merely using the childhood belief as an excuse for yourself.
This viewpoint is, in a certain perspective, actually very similar to the view of the third-generation psychologist Adler1. Adler's humanistic psychology holds: in your present affairs, when you take childhood trauma and those past events as your reasons, you are actually making up stories, and you are making excuses for your present beliefs. It just happens that those things can be used by you. If you do not use them, you will come up with some other reason or excuse, and the purpose is to make excuses for your present decision. Right now you decide to be fearful, timid, and unwilling to face things, so you bring out all those childhood events to use. If you are interested, you can look into this psychologist Adler's views.
Admit it, and discover what the intention of those purposes is -- admit this belief in your own worthlessness, admit it, and then look for what you are trying to achieve by thinking this way. Or you may have compensated, later becoming an athlete, using that thrust to move forward in your own way. If your mother hated you, you might use that to affirm your independence -- inwardly you wanted independence, and her hatred gave you just the excuse or the pathway. In all these situations, you form your own reality; therefore, you have agreed to those beliefs.
Don't Just Think, Take Action
Seth says that many people who write to him feel that they have extraordinary psychic and writing abilities, or feel a strong need to help others. They often compare what they are doing with what they think they are capable of doing, yet they often never make a start at developing their own abilities. He feels that he is very capable, has many ideas, could write them down to share with others, could help others, he feels he is so full of love, but he just does nothing, thinking about it every day. If he wants to write great philosophical theories, but has never written a single word on paper, or trusted himself enough to begin writing -- some people want to help the whole world, but they only think about this wish, and never actually try to realize it in a practical way, never taking any action in reality.
The ideal in their minds becomes so great that they are forever dissatisfied with their own performance, and are afraid to begin. The greater his ideal, the farther it is from reality, and the farther it is, the less he dares to act -- he wants to help all of humanity, wants to overcome cancer, but he feels that what he has to do now is too far from those things, so he might as well do nothing at all.
Their loving acknowledgment of their own uniqueness -- a loving acknowledgment of their own uniqueness and their own strengths -- can in itself let them understand how to begin using their abilities in their own way. And trust the present situation: your power to act is right now. Do not think about "in the future, when I am such and such, when I one day meet certain conditions, then I will go help others." No. Use the way you are now, your present conditions, and do the things that are right in front of you.
That ideal has not yet been realized; it is only a directional element. Only by using what you know you have right now, and having a quiet acceptance of your own opportunities and abilities -- acknowledging your own abilities, and also acknowledging that the present moment is a very good time -- and by using those things through the power of the present, can you find your direction. You must take action. When you want to do something, you do not necessarily have to think it through completely. Just go do it first, follow your inner impulse, do the first thing first, just make a start.
Do not be afraid of people saying you start things with great enthusiasm but end up with a three-minute passion. So what if it is a three-minute passion? Who says you have to finish something once you start it? Who told you that seeing things through from beginning to end is the only good way? If something better attracts you, of course you go do the better thing. Why would you not do the better thing just because you started something and therefore must finish it? No one has set that rule for you. If you spend your whole life in a constant state of three-minute passions, then would not your whole life be passionate all along? One three-minute passion after another, and you would always be in a state of exuberance -- how wonderful your life would be.
Seth is afraid that many people just think every day and do nothing, so he keeps emphasizing: go do it. Believe that your present environment is the best state, the best arrangement you have given yourself. Your present moment is already the best life arrangement you have had so far, the best state -- as Fan Wei says in the comedy sketch, "What more could you want, a bicycle?" This is the state you can use right now. Realize it immediately, do it immediately.
Between your great ideal and reality, the point where you are now is the path you must take, the point you must pass through -- the one mentioned at the beginning of this session. You have to believe this, believe in yourself, affirm yourself, accept the present state, and only then can you believe that this is the necessary path within your ideal. There will not be another point, another path, another opportunity waiting for you. If you have an ideal, then the present moment is its starting point. Just go do it, no need to wait any longer, no need to prepare any more -- this is what Seth says over and over again.
(Session 676)
Closing
The session went up to this point, and Seth took a break in the middle. After the break Jane was very tired, so the session did not continue any further.
When Seeking Help Becomes a Habit, It Is an Evasion of Responsibility
This session is the final session of The Nature of Personal Reality, and it is also the closing part of the entire book.
Seth says that when you think you need help, there is obviously nothing wrong with that. When we need help in our daily lives, there is nothing wrong with it at all, and sometimes you can indeed gain a great deal and benefit considerably. However, some people make a habit of asking others for help, and that is not good. When asking others for help becomes a habit, and you use it as a method of evading responsibility, that is not good.
When you think you need help, there is obviously nothing wrong.
I think the most classic example of this is in daily life. I remember reading an article a few years ago written by a top-level hacker2. Because in that article of his, there were many people asking him for advice, saying how they could become a hacker, and he had written a large number of popular science articles, but many people still kept asking him questions. He had a very bad temper and was very impatient, so he wrote a long article. He said: You people, before you ask me, don't you know how to search online? Just Baidu it or Google it, and many answers are right there. All you have to do is move your fingers and you will have everything. For knowledge that is so easily obtained, why do you come and ask me? Your attitude in asking me is simply not serious. You take troubling others for granted. Do you really want to learn? If you really want to learn, then go learn.
Then he talked about his own example. He said, I learned all this knowledge on my own, and no one taught me how to do this or that. When I truly encounter some real difficulties, or real problems in understanding, or in overall cognition, or some very deep thinking questions, including some core algorithms, when you cannot think them through clearly, you can go communicate with others or ask for guidance, and that is all normal. But for some obvious questions, why do you have to open your mouth and ask right away?
This article is very famous among people who work in IT or have studied computer-related technology, and most of you probably remember the article I am talking about. That article actually addressed exactly this kind of problem: when you make a habit of asking for help, you are evading the responsibility you should bear yourself.
For specific physical problems, for example when your body is sick, or in areas where you have no knowledge, in fields you simply do not understand at all, then you should seek professional help, and that is perfectly normal. But many people go to psychics, doctors, psychoanalysts, priests, pastors, friends, and also those gurus, masters, spiritual teachers, psychologists, all kinds of people, seeking answers for their entire life situation. When you do this, you deny your own ability for self-understanding and growth. You deny this ability of your own. This is something you should do yourself.
You ask others how your life should develop. You ask others where the direction and goal of your life is. You ask others what kind of life you should live and where your life should go. Think about it now, is it not ridiculous? But do not forget, before you studied spiritual material, before you studied the Seth material, were not such people everywhere? Every day asking masters: Tell me, what should I do next, tell me where my life direction is. How could others possibly know the direction of your life?
Because of your educational framework, the individual is taught to beware of the inner self.
Our education tells you that the inner self is unreliable. So he says, as mentioned earlier, in Chapter Two he discussed this issue, unfortunately you seek answers to personal questions outside of yourselves. Your education and the ideas you have been taught all tell you that your own inner heart is unreliable, too emotional, too childish, too idealistic. These are all the negative definitions of our inner self, telling you not to trust what is within yourself.
Is this not said too often? "Impulse is the devil," is that not a consensus in Chinese society? The catchphrase among young people says "impulse is the devil." Is that not denying your inner self? Are the words "impulse is the devil" not denying your inner self? They are indeed denying it. So you go outside to look for answers, and that is precisely where you are least likely to be found. What answers could there possibly be outside? You seek everything externally, and you will find nothing.
If you use the methods taught in this book, you should have a deeper understanding of yourself than before.
If you have finished reading Seth Speaks, and then read The Nature of Personal Reality, you have a deeper understanding of yourself, and you will then be able to handle your personal reality — this personal world of yours can be entirely handled by yourself. This book has already taught you all the methods for dealing with personal problems, and you no longer need to seek out others. You could even become a life mentor for others or something like that. But you had better not point fingers at other people's lives. You should only give them some general knowledge on the specific things they need, and let them find their own inner ability, rather than giving them advice from the outside.
Merely knowing that you form your own reality can release you from the limiting ideas that once hindered you in the past.
Just by knowing this one thing — that you form your own reality — you give yourself freedom. You will discover that the environment and world around you are all created by yourself, created by your own beliefs, and that completely breaks the shackles that limited you. Then you can creatively examine your beliefs. Because beliefs create reality, you can examine whether the reality you want and the beliefs you currently hold are a match. If they do not match, then you can only change your beliefs; there is no better way. Find the correlation between them and your experience.
Conscious knowledge alone, in and of itself, will trigger intuitive responses within the inner self.
From the perspective of the knowledge we are able to be aware of, it can directly trigger your inner intuitive responses, allowing your intuition to grow more and more. So many people who have read Seth Speaks or The Nature of Personal Reality have left comments afterward or communicated in groups saying that their intuition about precognition and future events is becoming stronger and stronger. Several people said they could accurately foresee what would happen the next day, and that intuition and feeling kept growing stronger.
Session 677
So you will receive that useful information through dreams, impulses, or ordinary thought patterns.
Not only the dreams, impulses, and hints that come from within, but also your most ordinary thought patterns—meaning you can also obtain it through thinking. Many people say, I have no spirituality, I don't have that kind of feeling, I haven't connected with my higher self, and I don't have a voice in my head speaking to me or anything like that. This is normal, this is the most normal thing. You don't need to say, "What should I do? Does this mean I can't learn spiritual things? I still haven't connected with my inner self." This is normal, don't dwell on it. Some people have certain special physical traits, and that is their business. For you, just follow your current state.
So he says that through ordinary thought patterns, meaning through the mode of thinking, you can also obtain this useful information. You don't necessarily have to reach some channeling state, or have your third eye opened, or any of that—none of it is required. If you can open those up, that's also fine; it gives you one more channel, one more way of understanding, or allows you to have a more direct cognition of this multidimensional existence. But if you don't have that, and you still believe without going through it, then you don't need it.
Creating Your Life Through Beliefs
If you affirm the beauty of your existence, then this will automatically weaken your beliefs that are contrary to that principle.
What does "contrary principle" mean? It means feeling that you are not beautiful, feeling that you are not good enough, feeling that your current situation is all terrible -- that is the contrary. When you affirm the beauty of your existence, it automatically weakens this belief that your present self is not good enough.
You can also, within your experience, equally hold an ideal image of yourself, and all the natural branches that extend out from it.
What does this sentence mean? It means that between two people in love, each holds an ideal image of the other. But if you are not in a relationship, you do not need someone else to set an ideal image for you -- you can hold an ideal image of yourself on your own: a very clear intention about your future development, about what kind of person you want to become in the future. And you must also hold all the natural branches that scatter out from this intention, that radiate out from it, that extend out from it -- all the possibilities that come with it.
You will begin from where you are now, and you will joyfully expand the attributes you already have, without expecting them to show themselves in full bloom.
Start from where you are right now. First expand the attributes you already have; do not expect them to shine brilliantly right away, to burst into great light, to immediately stand out and rise above others. Do not be like that. Life is a process of gradually unfolding and blooming. Do not only look forward to the final moment when the flower has fully bloomed and then withered; appreciate the process of it unfolding bit by bit from a bud. Your life is in a process of constant unfolding, and you must learn to appreciate and experience this process.
You will love yourself, and you will also love your neighbor without difficulty.
This is the most important part: you will love yourself, and you will also love your neighbor without difficulty -- that is, the people around you. It does not mean that you must be unaware of the discrepancies between the people you love and your ideals for them. What he means is that loving a person, including your neighbor and the people around you, does not mean you turn a blind eye to the gap between your expectations for them and their reality, playing the nice guy, pretending to be oblivious and saying "everything is fine, you are fine too." If there is a problem, point it out. Nor does it mean you must smile constantly, grinning foolishly at everyone every day, with that mysterious smile all over your face -- because you are a spiritual practitioner, you have reached great enlightenment, so you grin at everyone. If you do that, I estimate it will not be long before everyone avoids you. You can try it: smile at everyone you see, and people will think something is definitely wrong with you.
Indeed, within your animal dimension, affirm your effectiveness and beauty.
In the animal dimension -- that is, in our physical body -- he always uses this term -- that is, in this material world of your flesh, affirm your effectiveness and beauty. Because this is the last session, he is speaking more about his expectations for our future and his parting words to you.
Once you begin comparing yourself with some idealized view of yourself, you will automatically feel guilty, because you have not yet reached your ideal state.
When you feel that the gap and chasm between your ideal and your reality is very large, you will feel guilt. When you have not dealt with your own beliefs, this guilt can be triggered by harmless gaps and characteristics -- it is often triggered by small things that are in themselves harmless, little episodes, or certain particular traits.
It is a good idea to make a list of the specific actions and behaviors that fill you with guilt.
That is, list out these behaviors and events that trigger your guilt, that give you feelings of guilt, shame, and so on -- these negative emotions, these things that can trigger these negative emotions in you. For example, some people are normally very fine and very confident, but the moment they see their mother-in-law, their confidence instantly vanishes. The mother-in-law immediately launches a soul-searching interrogation: Did you buy a house? Did you buy a car? Have you secured the school-district apartment? For a young person in a first-tier city in China, just imagine how he is supposed to answer these questions. Some people, when they encounter particular people or particular events, will instantly feel this kind of guilt -- the chasm between their ideal and their reality suddenly becomes enormous, and they become extremely dissatisfied with themselves. These kinds of things, these kinds of situations, these trigger points -- observe them in your life, and after observing them, list them all out. Why does this kind of thing happen? Why is it that in such an environment, you suddenly have this guilt?
List these things out one by one, including the events, behaviors, or particular scenarios. Once you have listed them, you can often quite easily trace them back to early childhood beliefs. For example, that feeling in front of your mother-in-law is very often connected to things from your childhood. When you stand before your mother-in-law, you suddenly feel as if you have returned to the state of facing your parents as a child, because the way your mother-in-law scrutinizes you and finds fault with you feels just like being scrutinized by your parents when you were little. So you must observe it.
Some were told to you by well-meaning parents who wanted to protect you.
That is, those childhood beliefs are now outdated. On this point, Westerners do it better. Whether it is the mother-in-law or their own biological parents, once a person turns eighteen, they treat them as an equal, and do not feel that the older generation is a level above them -- whether in terms of bearing, emotion, family hierarchy, or even finances, they consider each other equal. But China is different. Always remember that China is different, with this particularity.
Many of your childhood beliefs were told to you by well-meaning parents who wanted to protect you. For example, many boys are told by their parents: You know, girls nowadays are very materialistic; keep your eyes wide open when you look for a partner. Before you have even started looking for a partner, you have been instilled with the negative belief that "women are very materialistic." As for girls, their parents will say: Men nowadays are all irresponsible, they do not want to get married, and even if they do marry they will not take care of the family, and after having children they will not help raise them. They are still playing games every day in their twenties and thirties, never growing up, mama's boys, giant babies. This also instills many other beliefs in you. You understand that back then, these beliefs were all meant by your parents to protect you, fearing that you would be deceived at an age when you were not mature enough. But as you grow up, these beliefs must be discarded. They are not your beliefs; they were instilled by your parents.
Some were instilled in you out of ignorance by some adult when you were little -- some so-called person with life experience. Their beliefs were themselves wrong; they grew up eating these wrong beliefs, and then they passed these beliefs on to you. Because they felt they were adults and you were a child at the time, you would think what they said made so much sense that "I was left speechless." This kind of wrong indoctrination can lead to problems in your later life development. Now list them all out and find where their roots lie.
When you bring all these behaviors, these events, these behaviors and events that make you feel guilty, out into the light of day, many of these beliefs will dissolve in the face of your understanding.
When you truly list them out and see them clearly, you will find that they no longer exist, because at your current level of understanding they have become absurd to the extreme. But you never saw them before, and you kept following this inertia, being led by the nose. Today, when you list them out one by one, you will find that they have long been unnecessary.
Affirm Yourself, Trust Yourself
When you affirm your own rightness in the universe, then you will automatically and easily cooperate with others.
Be sure to remember: affirmation. In our society today, if you do not cooperate with others, you cannot get much done. This is an age of cooperation, a cooperative world, not like before. Treat it as part of your own nature. What nature? Cooperating with others. You can cooperate with others very smoothly. Many young people nowadays are not very willing to cooperate with others, except when playing games; at other times they hardly cooperate at all.
By being yourself, you help others be themselves as well.
When you firmly believe in yourself and affirm yourself, while being yourself, are you not also helping others be themselves? You will also encourage them to become themselves. You will not envy the talents you yourself do not have. When you get along with friends, with colleagues, with the environment and people around you, you will not envy the abilities you lack. For example, his sales ability is stronger, while your marketing and market planning ability is stronger; his management ability is stronger, while your emotional intelligence is higher. You will not envy the abilities you do not have, for those are other people's abilities. Because you can encourage the talents within others with an open heart, encourage others to bring out their potential. Because you also know that you yourself have your own unique abilities that others do not have. You are one of a kind, so you do not need to dominate others, nor should you envy others. You do not need to do that, because you have your own uniqueness, and others have their own uniqueness. You will not shrink in front of them either, will not feel inferior, saying, "I do not have this ability he has, I feel so inferior." No, because your uniqueness is something others do not have either.
You must at some time begin to trust yourself.
Be sure to remember: you must at some point begin to believe in yourself. Sooner or later you must begin. He says, I suggest you do it right now. Seth is also very direct. Do not say, "I will start tomorrow," or "Let us talk about it later." He says start right now, trust yourself right now. If you refuse to do this thing of trusting yourself, then you will forever depend on others to confirm your own worth to you. If you dare not trust yourself, you will have to accept other people's judgments of your value. Only when others think you have value can you recognize your own worth through their words, and that is very sad. And you will never be satisfied, because your sense of worth needs to be validated by others. You will forever be asking others what you should do, because you have no self-confidence, you do not believe in yourself.
At the same time, you will also resent those very people from whom you sought help.
You asked them, and they helped you, yet in the end you resent them. Why resent them? Because to you, it seems that their experience is legitimate, while yours is counterfeit, and you feel cheated. What does he mean by this? It means that when you go to others for help, when you ask them what you should do next, that person may not have studied spiritual knowledge at all, yet he really does tell you, "This is how I succeeded." How many people in life share their successful experiences? Many people are especially willing to listen to this kind of success philosophy, to other people's success stories. But afterward, you turn around and, without saying it aloud, curse them in your heart. Why curse them? Because you discover that what worked for them does not work for you. Even if you listen to a thousand lectures by Jack Ma, you will not become Jack Ma. When you have dinner with Warren Buffett, many people say a lunch auction went for several million dollars3. Do you think that by having this meal with Buffett you can learn something or gain something? It is more of a publicity stunt, an advertising effect. Because other people's experiences belong to them, they are of no use to you, so you feel you have been deceived. Actually, they did not deceive you.
During a break, their cat Willy was sick, so during the session they let it stay nearby. Usually they kept the cat shut away somewhere else, because it would disturb Jane. Now it woke up, and while Jane sat in the rocking chair speaking for Seth, the cat walked over to Jane and crouched down, preparing to jump into her lap. Rob called it over, and it then curled up on the sofa beside her. Jane was still in trance, and later she told Rob that Seth, with a kindly smile, had waited for this little episode to resolve itself on its own, meaning the cat wanting to jump into Jane's lap and interrupt the delivery, but in the end Rob called the cat aside.
In particular, you will find yourself exaggerating the negative aspects of your life, and exaggerating the positive aspects of other people's experience.
That is, when you do not trust yourself, you will exaggerate the negative side of your own life, and exaggerate the positive side of other people's experience. You are denying yourself and exaggerating others.
You are a multidimensional personality.
First of all, you are multidimensional. You do not live only in this three-dimensional world. Your essence is a personality of a multidimensional world. Believe in the miracle of your own existence. Your very existence in this three-dimensional world is a miracle. Do not make any distinction between the physical and the spiritual in your life. Do not forcibly separate the spiritual and the physical, saying this is physical and that is of the soul. Because they are one. The spirit speaks with the voice of the body, and the body is created by the psyche. So do not separate your spirit and your body; they cannot be separated.
Do not place the words of gurus, priests, ministers, scientists, psychologists, friends, or even my words, above the feelings of your own existence.
This sentence is very important; you should underline it as well. No matter who it is, so-called spiritual teachers, spiritual masters, Seth himself, their words can never override your own feelings. Your own feelings come first. Seth emphasizes this once again here.
You can learn much from others, but the deepest knowledge must come from yourself.
That is, this unity of knowledge and action, this process in which knowledge must be realized and verified through practice. That is why, after we finish Seth Speaks, we must arrange a 21-day meditation, so that everyone does not remain only at the level of theory, and does not turn Seth into a new superstition. The most central point Seth teaches you is to be yourself, believe in yourself, love yourself. When you accomplish all this, you will be able to bring out your own inner potential, and you do not need to obtain anything from outside. He is not saying you do not need to learn other things. Seth's material, other spiritual materials, including Buddhist ones, including anything else beneficial to you, can all be studied and accepted. But you must know that they cannot replace you, they cannot stand above you. The deepest knowledge must come from your own realization and experience.
Your own consciousness is stepping into a reality.
When you are learning, your consciousness steps into a reality. Seth has said that a single thought of yours, one idea, gives rise to a possibility, and a possibility gives rise to a reality. When you think, is the level where that thinking consciousness resides not an independent reality? The reality your consciousness enters basically cannot be experienced by anyone else. It is not like this three-dimensional world of ours, where we can all experience it together. Come on, let us all go to the amusement park, to Disneyland, to Happy Valley, and have an experience together. In the three-dimensional world we can experience things together, but on the level of consciousness, you yourself experience the reality where your own consciousness is, and no one else can go in and experience it with you. This is your own firsthand experience.
That is in itself unique, and cannot be translated.
In that reality, it is in itself unique, and cannot be translated back. You cannot describe it to others by saying, "Today during meditation, this is what my consciousness went through, and this is where I felt I went." Those things are your own. To you they are truly important help, but do they have meaning for others? No. Therefore, when others tell you about their spiritual and consciousness experiences, that is also of no use. So do not talk about these specific feelings. These feelings can only be your own.
It has its own meaning.
Your own reality, your own consciousness, the things you experience while exploring and experiencing within your own reality, are meaningful to you. And following the path of its own becoming, consciousness itself is constantly changing. It experiences within different realities, and then continually becomes a fuller self, or a more complete self. It is in this process.
You share an existence with those who are also traveling their own way through the journey.
You and those probable selves of yours, those reincarnational selves of yours, share one common entity. You are one common entity. You are traveling simultaneously, in different eras, under different backgrounds, in different environments. Be kind to your traveling companions, because you share the same entity.
I am traveling as well, and I am trying to give you the knowledge and material I possess through Ruburt and Joseph.
Seth says that he himself is still traveling, and that he is giving you the knowledge and material he possesses through Ruburt and Joseph, that is, Jane and Rob. You can regard Ruburt and Jane as a part of Seth in our three-dimensional world, the part of him that speaks this book. Because in his own time and space, if Seth did not make use of Ruburt and Jane, we would not be able to sense Seth's existence. So Ruburt and Jane are like a small part of Seth that we can see in this three-dimensional world. Using such an image as an analogy, can we understand that our physical body is also only a small part of our soul that can be seen in this world? The same principle. However, they are themselves. Ruburt is still Ruburt, Jane is still Jane. That is, Ruburt and Joseph, the two of them, are still themselves, not Seth, just as I am still myself. There is no merging or substitution between them; each is each.
The Book's Afterword
Seth said we could take a break. By 10:17 Jane's trance state was very good, and her delivery was steady and fairly calm. After the break she said, "You know what? I thought this book would be longer, but I have that strange attached feeling, the sense that Seth is going to finish it very soon. I have that shivery feeling. I don't know how you feel." She laughed, "But I'd love to see him stretch it out for another five chapters." Rob told Jane, "I think Seth will finish the book tonight." You can see Rob's intuition was also very accurate. Then Rob joked, "We could ask him for the title of his next book." The book wasn't even finished, and he was already asking Seth about the title of the next one. Jane patted the top of her own head and said, "His material is already piled up this high." She meant that the Seth material had long been ready; it just depended on when Jane could transmit it and finish speaking it. For Seth, that material had been there all along.
Seth had a note on the material given before the break: in Chapter Nineteen he discussed reincarnation in general terms, but in this book he said very little about his psychic connection with Jane and Rob. The relationship among the three of them -- Seth, Rob, and Jane -- he spoke of very little in this book. But in The Seth Material and Seth Speaks he said a great deal, with references to this connection scattered throughout. In the appendix of Seth Speaks, which is Session 595, Seth specifically discussed the connection among the three of them. And we also have a small amount of unpublished material, that is, some private session content -- for example, exploring the reincarnational branches involving only the three of them would itself require an entire book. Because if you were to depict the affairs of the three of them clearly, it would take a whole book. In The Early Sessions a great deal of space was used; they kept pressing Seth: what exactly was their relationship with Seth? What about their relatives, friends, parents, siblings? Aunts and uncles and all the rest -- they asked many times. Sometimes Seth was already quite annoyed and said, there's no meaning in asking this; I don't know what your purpose or meaning is in asking it.
In that era, during the early sessions period, Rob and Jane's focus was still that half-believing, half-doubting mindset, full of curiosity and novelty. They didn't know that what Seth wanted to convey was a description of knowledge about this world and about the future development of all humanity; they were more concerned with those personal, trivial matters. But this is also very real, and it fits a person's normal psychological state. For example, if one day you developed this kind of ability, the first thing you might learn might not be the future development of the universe and humanity; you might first want to know what kind of relationship you have with your current partner. You might especially want to see what karmic connection exists between his past lives and you. You might even want to look into your parents and so on. This is very normal, just human nature.
Ruburt's belief in the nature of his own consciousness helped bring this book through.
Ruburt had great faith in himself. Although on the surface, due to the pressure of social opinion about channeling, her ego was somewhat resistant, she absolutely trusted the nature of her own consciousness. So you can see her delivery was very stable, very good.
Ruburt and Joseph both devoted themselves to exploring the nature of creativity, and they had been seeking answers since they were very young.
They had been searching for the nature of creativity since they were very young. But what was most important? They trusted the beauty of the fate of their existence. What he means is that in the course of their life's development, if we look at it from the perspective of our three-dimensional world, the two of them were not very smooth. If we look at it from our perspective, before they came into contact with the Seth material, or for a period after that contact, their lives were extremely difficult, with no fixed or stable source of income. At that time Jane still had to go to work at a gallery every day to earn the most basic living expenses. Rob would paint some pictures and do illustrations for books; one painting might earn a few dozen dollars, and one or two hundred was rare. In The Early Sessions it was once said that when one of Rob's paintings could sell for 200 dollars, he was very surprised, wondering whether it could really sell for that much.
So they were living under those conditions, but the two of them never doubted. They always firmly believed in the validity of their existence, and they also believed that their fate was beautiful. Sometimes they might feel they had lost their direction, and like ordinary people, they would wonder what on earth they were doing, that such a life seemed to have no goal or hope in sight, no way to see what the future would be like. And during certain periods they might have had some problems, and thus temporarily forgot their goal -- their goal was to explore the nature of creativity. Sometimes they forgot.
But their sense of their own individuality, and their joint beliefs, were strong enough to bring them their present reality.
Although they also experienced such setbacks, doubts, self-hesitation, and loss of direction, and encountered many difficulties and problems, they still had those beliefs, whether individual or shared, that created their reality of today. What reality? That is, one of them insisted on painting and the other insisted on writing books; even when life had gotten to that point, they still believed so firmly. Rob was already almost fifty by then, and Jane was in her thirties; the two of them were still renting a place to live, with no security in life, not knowing where the next meal was coming from. Yet they firmly believed in each other, encouraged each other, affirmed each other, and accepted such a way of life. Seth says here that it was because of their persistence, their acceptance of their own beliefs, and their belief in themselves that the whole series of events with Seth's emergence later came about.
Many who have written to me want to develop and use the same abilities.
They all want to develop the same abilities as Jane and Rob, to also connect with someone like Seth. Yet in their hearts, it can be clearly seen that their beliefs prevent them from generating enough trust in the inner self. But after Jane and Rob had been in contact with Seth for a while, at first they were too embarrassed to ask, but once they became familiar they often asked Seth: oh, what about my income? Can this book be published? How much will the publisher pay? When will we get the money? They would also often ask these very practical little questions about daily life. But these people who wrote to them, these readers who wanted to become someone like Jane, were not trusting enough of their own inner selves.
You cannot be afraid of your own being, and hope to travel through it or experience its dimensions.
You cannot be afraid of yourself and then go exploring your own inner self; that's impossible. First you must take the simple first step of affirming identity. Your first step is to affirm yourself, to affirm the validity, the reality, and the wholeness of your own existence.
That affirmation will release those attributes that you possess.
Affirmation of yourself and trust in yourself is the first step, the first step of everything. If you cannot accomplish this step, then you cannot open up those attributes that come after. Once those attributes are opened, you can then open up a new attainment of experience. When you trust yourself, when you affirm that your present moment is the best state, then you begin to activate those abilities that had been bound up by you all along, and then you will have new experiences, thus entering a new attainment of experience.
They will be, and must be, your own.
Those attributes -- that is, the attributes you release -- they will certainly be, and must be, your own. Perhaps not yet.
When you ask someone else to interpret your dreams, for example, you automatically put the fulfillment of your own potential one step further away.
Originally you could interpret your own dreams, but you feel you cannot explain them, and you insist that someone else must explain them, so you move one step further away from that reality in which your potential is brought into play. Not only have you not realized it, you are even one step further away. Why? Because the potential you want to bring into play, and the ability you want to use to ask yourself in the dream state what this dream actually means, are one and the same ability. You cannot deny this ability and still want that other ability. When you want to go into the storehouse of the inner self's potential to look for your potential, it is in the same place as your ability to interpret your own dreams; both require trusting your own intuition and trusting your own judgment. When you deny one, you deny the other, so you get further and further away.
When you ask someone else to tell you the direction of your life, to a certain extent, you no longer know that you are already in possession of it. You clearly know the direction of your own life, so why ask someone else? But after asking once, twice, three times, in the end you really come to feel that you don't know.
If you do not have effective awareness of the above points, then no method can help you.
Up to this point, in ordinary terms, this book has not included any esoteric instructions. This book does not tell you any secret words, mantras, rituals, methods, or steps of practice -- none of that. It has no esoteric content to help you achieve what you might consider spiritual development or specialized psychic knowledge. Many people think that spiritual things should have their own characteristics and features, including the necessity of a master or guru, the necessity of extraordinary achievements, the necessity of supernatural powers. If none of these are present, then it isn't spiritual. So they would say, I don't want to study this; what can I gain from studying it? If it could give me this kind of thing -- for example, I'll teach you to open your third eye, or that person says I'll teach you out-of-body experience -- they feel these are the things related to spirituality. But you see, Seth never mentioned any of these from beginning to end. Why? He did not want to teach you in that way, making you think these are spiritual development. He felt that would mislead you into thinking spirituality is nothing more than these supernatural powers. You understand Seth's good intentions.
For those who want to use animalistic behavior as a framework through which to perceive and experience other realities, however, this book is a beginning.
This book is not about teaching supernatural powers, nor is it one of those books that teach what you think of as spirituality -- none of that. He says this book teaches those in the three-dimensional world how, through studying this book, to perceive and experience other realities -- other realities in other dimensional spaces. If you want to achieve such a purpose, then this book is an excellent beginning.
As I said earlier, denying the flesh will not make you more spiritual.
This was said in Chapter Seven. Denying the existence of the flesh will not make you more spiritual. This is the life you are living; trust the life that flows through you. You must trust yourself, trust every bit of life that flows through you, trust the emotions that flow through your life, trust the events that happen to you -- all of this you must trust.
When you do so, other realities will also make themselves known to you.
When you trust your present reality, when you trust your present life, then your other realities will also let themselves be known to you. And they will increase the dimensions and depth of your present reality. So I live in the three-dimensional world; what help is it to me to understand higher-dimensional worlds or other-dimensional worlds? The main thing is that it can increase the dimensions and depth of your present reality; your perception will become different.
Written separately, to emphasize: you create your own reality. No matter where you travel, and no matter in which dimension you find yourself, it is the same.
No matter which physical world, which nonphysical world, which time-space, which universe you go to, you are always creating your own reality. Before you begin other journeys of consciousness, you must understand that your beliefs will follow you and form your experience. You must clearly understand that no matter where you go, your beliefs will follow you, and they will work there just as they work here; the way your beliefs function is the same.
If you believe in demons, you will encounter them. In your three-dimensional world, they generally appear in the form of enemies; enemies are the embodiment of the demons in your mind. And in other realms of consciousness, they appear in the form of demons or psychic evil spirits. If you enter a meditative state or some other state, entering another dimension, in that imagined world, that world of probabilities, the demons in your mind will actually manifest, appearing as devils or evil spirits in such a time-space world. But in our three-dimensional world, a demon with an ox's head will not appear; it cannot appear, but it will appear in life in the form of enemies.
The Essence of Emotion Is Love
If you are afraid of your emotions, believing they are wrong, then when you try this experiment of channeling, perhaps you will believe you are possessed.
If you fear your own emotions, if you feel that emotions are all unreliable, not rational enough, not sensible enough, then when you are doing channeling experiments, those suppressed emotions will seem demonized. Because you do not trust emotions, you have suppressed all of them. But the suppressed emotions, when you are in a channeling state, they all burst out, like demons. You will be afraid, and assign them to yourself; you are very afraid that these demons have come to find you, and therefore you will think they belong to a soul that has left the body. You will take these demons, and because you do not admit they come from your own inner heart, you will say these demons all come from some soul, some evil spirit.
It is very important to understand that all emotions are truly innocent.
Why are you afraid of your own emotions? All of your emotions truly have nothing bad in themselves; emotions themselves have no good or bad distinction, and feelings do not either. Because each emotion, if it is not interfered with, if you just follow it, it will lead you back into the reality of love. If you do not interfere with this emotion, if you just follow this emotion, go along with this feeling, it will by itself bring you back into this reality of love. Because love is the foundation of all emotions; you must remember this, including fear, including dread, including hatred and such things, their essence is all love. If you follow it and let it flow, it will ultimately bring you back into this reality of love.
If anyone tells you that because of your nature or your physical existence you are evil or sinful, or any such dogma, then do not believe them.
What he is saying here is more directed at people in Christianity: if someone tells you that you have original sin, that you are born sinful, that your very living carries sin, then do not believe them anymore.
Do not trust anyone who leads you away from your own true self.
When a person, through whatever means, tries to make you leave your true knowledge of yourself, then do not believe them. Do not follow those who tell you that you must atone, no matter by what means. What he is saying here is all related to the church. Instead, trust the spontaneity of your own existence. You must affirm that your existence itself is spontaneous; you do not need anyone else's redemption, nor do you need someone to baptize you or perform some ritual for you to be qualified to live in this world. You do not need that. You yourself are free and unrestrained; you are born with the qualification to live in this world, and with the life that you yourself possess.
If you do not like where you are now, then examine those beliefs of yours and bring them out into the light of day. There is nothing within you to be afraid of.
Do not be afraid to pull your beliefs out; there is nothing to be afraid of. Just pull them all out and see why you do not like your current environment, why you do not like the place where you now live, where the reason lies.
To say it separately: My life is mine, and I formed it.
What does he mean by this? It means that if you do not like your surrounding environment, you are actually denying yourself in a disguised way; you are not affirming yourself. You do not admit that the environment you now live in is created by yourself; you formed it. How can you dislike and be dissatisfied with something you yourself formed? You yourself accomplished it, created it.
Often tell yourself this sentence: My life is mine, and I formed it.
From now on, create your life; begin to create your own new life! Use your beliefs, just as an artist uses colors, to paint your life. What kind of life do you want?
There is no situation that you cannot change.
You must remember, there is no situation that you cannot change. Even your past can be changed, and your future can also be changed; there is nothing that cannot be changed. Except within the animal realm, the indisputable physical conditions you accepted at birth, such as missing an organ or certain functional deficiencies, like being born blind and such, apart from these situations you can change everything.
If you are filled with self-pity because of an illness or a life situation, then seize this opportunity to begin honestly facing your beliefs and find the reason for the difficulty.
When illness appears in your life, or when your life situation is full of difficulties, do not fall into self-pity. You must seize this opportunity — the opportunity of being ill, or the opportunity of the current bad situation — it is a very good point that can let you fully recognize what the reasons are for these events happening, and which beliefs hidden behind them have led to today's situation. Whether it is your illness or your life situation, both are brought about by your beliefs.
Walking Through the Divinity of Your Existence
I am speaking with my inner vitality, which is innate within every reader.
Seth says he is speaking through Jane, speaking through his inner vitality, and each of you, every reader, also has this inner vitality innately within you.
I am speaking with inner knowledge, and that also belongs to these readers.
You also have this knowledge. What I am talking about, each of you actually has it.
As I have said before, I will use it now as a closing: you have been given the gifts of the gods.
You have been endowed with the divine gift of ability — you create your reality according to your beliefs, and this is a divinely endowed ability. According to your beliefs, you can create your reality.
What you possess is the creative energy that forms your world.
What you possess is that energy within our bodies, and it is the same energy that created the mountains and rivers, the stars and the moon, the universe in which we now live, and the magnitude of the energy is also the same. Simply put, you have the abilities of the gods, the power of the gods, and you are born with it.
Such a self has no limitations, except for those you believe in.
Beyond the beliefs you yourself have accepted, you have no limitations. If you insist on imposing limitations on yourself, that is a problem of your own beliefs, but in your essence you have no limitations.
I am Seth, and I speak my name with joy, although the name itself is not important.
So every morning each of you should also speak your own name in an affirmative tone, remember to use an affirmative tone. When you speak your own name in a joyful way, in an affirmative tone, what are you doing? You are affirming yourself, affirming your own existence, affirming the divinity within you. The name itself is not important; what is important is that affirmation, what is important is that trust in yourself. The name is just a label.
You create your life through the inner power of your existence.
You exist in this world — where does that come from? From within your body. It is not some human evolution, biological evolution, or coming from monkeys — none of that. The root of your existence in this world is nowhere else; it is within your body.
Yet it transcends the self you know.
It transcends those parts of yourself that you know.
Use those creative abilities with the unrestrained abandon of understanding, respect yourself, and walk through the divinity of your existence.
What does this mean? It means that when you are living, you should walk through every day of your life with the footsteps of the gods — that is, walk through the divinity of your existence. You must learn to use this ability, this creativity, in an unrestrained and unfettered way — what does unrestrained and unfettered mean? It means do not impose any limitations on yourself. And then also respect yourself, believe in yourself. That last sentence he said is especially poetic: walk through the divinity of your existence.
This book ends here.
Rob's Notes
Then at the very end, Seth added one more closing piece, saying that Ruburt and Joseph each have their own journeys to take, and the two of them both have their own rhythms of existence that rise and fall and flow. Ruburt has some work to do involving connections. And then Seth, Ruburt, and Rob -- he told Rob to write a book, a book about art and how he himself writes about art through a spiritual perspective. All three of us have to write books: Seth has to write Seth's book, Jane has to write Jane's book, and Rob, you also have to write your book. These books will all come out one after another. And several centuries ago, we really did begin the things that seem to have already begun. That is, several hundred years ago, they had already made an appointment; what Seth was saying is that several hundred years ago, the occurrence of today's events had already been predetermined.
Then there is Rob's introduction regarding the period after Jane finished the final session. During most of the final session, Jane was very quiet and extremely steady. As for her role in this Seth book, this long book, Jane's role as the transmitter had come to an end. He felt both amazed, as he said several times, and also somewhat downcast.
Fortunately, a week earlier, she had just finished the preface for this book, so that had already been delivered to the publisher. They did not think Seth would make an appendix; this book has no appendix, and it ends right here. Then Jane said, but she also could not believe that it was really over. She said once again, as far as I am concerned, this whole thing was effortless. She said that for her the matter did not require effort, as if she had simply spoken it out of her mouth; she just sat here day after day talking and talking, and that was all. Every week she spent two or three evenings sitting here talking and talking, and the book was finished. Although what she said was true, she had hardly taken into account the deep emotional and intellectual investment she had made in this book over the past ten months.
She went on to explain that during the process of this book's production and creation, from the very first session onward, every week she and the students in her ESP class were studying this Seth book. This book was different from Seth Speaks: from the moment the writing began, as soon as each session came out, their ESP class would take the content of the book back to study it and learn from it. And when she was alone, she also often had to read it. Even so, she still declared: now I want to read it through again from the beginning, because then I can have an overall conception of it -- before, it had always been read session by session. Rob told Jane that he thought she had produced a very good book.
After that came some notes. What Seth said in the closing remarks about Jane and the other books proved to be quite accurate. Even as they were preparing to send this book to press, two of her other books -- Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time4 and Aspect Psychology5 -- both received publishing contracts from the publisher. The former is a book of poetry, and the latter is a book about the theory of psychic matters. Portions of both books had already been introduced and appeared within this book, and Jane had also discussed them in her own preface. Rob was responsible for doing the illustrations for these two books. She referred to the poetry collection simply as "Dialogues," and there would be a related introduction in Chapter Ten. And Aspect Psychology5, apart from other places, was also discussed in Session 618 of Chapter Three; it was derived from her own explorations of consciousness and her writing, and it was discussed in Chapter Twenty-One of Seth Speaks, and it was also included there. So she wanted to say that regarding the matter of the several of them continuing to bring out many more books, Seth had foreseen it long before.
All right, as for this book, The Nature of Personal Reality, up to this part it has been fully completed. I hope that through this book everyone can carefully reflect on your own life and change your own life. If you are satisfied with your present circumstances, then continue living happily. If you are not satisfied with your present circumstances, first affirm your present circumstances as your foundation, and starting from this present state as your starting point, then begin planning your new life. Just as Seth mentioned in the final session, in that last session he gave you more guiding opinions and suggestions for planning your future life.
注释与核实
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According to Mike's original words, it was "third-generation psychologist Adler"; upon verification, it should be "Adler was an Austrian psychiatrist and founder of Individual Psychology, belonging to the early psychoanalytic camp and the first to break with Freud, rather than a representative of the 'third-generation psychology' (humanistic psychology)—the latter's pioneers were Maslow and Rogers." (Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Alfred Adler | Austrian Psychologist & Founder of Individual Psychology," https://www.britannica.com/biography/Alfred-Adler) ↩
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Source: Eric S. Raymond, Rick Moen, "How To Ask Questions The Smart Way" (http://www.catb.org/~esr/faqs/smart-questions.html) ↩
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Source: CNBC, "Warren Buffett charity lunch fetches winning bid of $19 million" (https://www.cnbc.com/2022/06/18/warren-buffett-charity-lunch-fetches-winning-bid-of-19-million.html) ↩
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Source: Jane Roberts, "Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time" (Prentice-Hall, 1975) (https://openlibrary.org/books/OL5191888M/Dialogues_of_the_soul_and_mortal_self_in_time) ↩