Mike's commentary · Seth Speaks, Chapter 17

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

Introduction

This chapter points out that development is not a single-line ascent, but rather the soul unfolding from its center in all directions; good and evil are not opposites, evil does not exist, and the devil and hell are illusions projected by fear and belief. Religious symbols such as Christ's ascension and crucifixion were set up for the perceptual mode of humanity at that time, while Buddhism comes closer to the essence of reality but does not grasp the eternal validity of the soul. Speakers transmit inner knowledge at all levels of consciousness through symbols and dreams; consciousness has multiple levels, and the stages of sleep correspond to different activities in reality. People can learn to shift the focus of consciousness, solve problems in dreams, and promote healing.

Key Points of This Chapter

• Development does not proceed upward along a single direction; rather, the soul stands at its own center and explores and expands in all directions simultaneously.
• Evil does not exist. The devil and hell are illusions projected by fear and belief, and the soul will not remain ignorant forever.
• Religious symbols such as Christ's ascension and crucifixion were chosen to match the perceptual modes of humans within a particular reality system, and are not inherent to inner reality itself.
• Buddhist descriptions come closer to the nature of reality, but they do not grasp the eternal validity and uniqueness of the soul.
• Consciousness has multiple levels, and the various stages of sleep correspond to different reality activities. Speakers transmit knowledge through symbols and dreams in the deep sleep regions, and people can learn to shift the focus of consciousness, solving problems during sleep and promoting physical healing.

Main Text

He went straight into the title of this chapter, and then continued with the main text. He said Christian doctrine speaks of "Christ's ascension into heaven," because after Christ was on the cross, he later began to ascend into heaven, and Christ had already returned to the side of the Heavenly Father.

Session 568

Ascension implies rising straight up into heaven, and the development of the soul is also often discussed in terms of direction.

We often say "ascension." There is a book called Ascension¹, and many, many other books all say, for example, in various ways, that you should keep rising upward, keep elevating, reach a higher level, a higher state. We just assume that progress is upward; so-called progress is always upward.

At the same time, the terrifying scenes of religious punishment are all about going down to hell -- we use "down," we say "going down to hell." No one says "going up to hell"; it is always "down to hell." So we naturally define heaven as above and hell as below, and we set this up as having an above and a below.

Therefore, in Christian terms, development is seen as moving only in a single linear direction -- that is, up and down. So-called development is viewed only from the perspective of up and down; it is rarely thought of as horizontal. It is always up and down. So the popular concept of evolution, the evolution we often talk about, spread this theory widely: it is a process of constantly rising upward. Traditional evolutionary theory holds that human beings evolved from apes along a single line of development.

At this point he humorously says that Christ could actually also have disappeared in a horizontal direction. He said above that Christ ascended, that Christ's ascension was in an upward direction, so he says Christ could also have vanished sideways -- why did it have to be upward? He is joking. Because this book was going to be published in a Christian country, he often uses Christianity, this very widespread religion, as a foundation.

He says:

The inner meaning of the information in the word "development" was stated in terms that people of that time could understand, consistent with their basic assumptions.

His basic assumption is: how do we understand development? We think development is upward. He says that in fact, development unfolds in all directions; development is not a single direction.

He says the development of the soul is not climbing up a series of ladders, where each rung climbed represents going up a step, representing a newer or higher stage of development. We think that the state of humanity, the state of the soul, keeps elevating like this, layer by layer. We often have this view, in many, many cases.

He says this is actually not the case; this is a mistaken view. What is the correct view? He says:

The soul stands at the center of itself.

You must have a feeling for this, an image of it. When you walk between heaven and earth, when you walk within this universe, you are the center of this universe. You are the soul standing at the very center, at the same instant -- not in sequence, but at the same time -- exploring in all directions, in every direction, 360 degrees with no blind spots, expanding its abilities, expanding its abilities in every direction, involving itself in creative issues, each one of which is extremely legitimate.

The word "legitimate" here is actually not translated well; it should be the word "valid." Each one is very real; each expansion is real.

He says the probable reality systems -- that is the part about "probabilities" we discussed in the previous chapter -- in those systems, the nature of the soul is revealed to you: your essence is the simultaneous coexistence of multiple probabilities. This should considerably change your popular religious concepts, that is, the mainstream religious concepts; it will considerably change our views.

For this reason, the nature of good and evil is a very important point. Below he explains what good is and what evil is.

On the other hand, quite simply and in a way you cannot presently understand, evil does not exist.

From another angle, to put it in one sentence: in a way you cannot presently understand, evil does not exist. Later he will try his best to explain this matter.

As for this way of understanding, we already covered why evil exists when we introduced Genesis and the origin of the universe in the previous chapter -- he says here that most people do not quite understand this way, so we will not repeat it here.

He says, however, although you cannot understand that evil does not exist, you obviously still have to face very evil things; in our lives we still have to face many evil things.

People often say that since there is a God, there must therefore be a devil.

If you say there is good, then there must be evil; if you say God, then corresponding to God there is a devil. As for good, evil, and the devil, that was also introduced in that same session. His viewpoint here is actually consistent with the viewpoint in Conversations with God²; there is no conflict.

It is like saying that because an apple has an upper half, it must therefore have a lower half. He says, yet people have no understanding of the fact that both of these are parts of the same apple. We think good and evil are opposites, but actually you do not realize that these are two sides of one thing; there is neither good nor evil.

Let us return to our basic theory:

You create reality through your emotions, thoughts, and mental acts.

This is our basic theory: we create our reality. Some of these are specifically materialized; some are realized and acted upon in our actual three-dimensional world, while others that are not acted upon are realized in probable systems, realized in other times and spaces.

The moment one of your thoughts arises, some thoughts you actualize, and some thoughts are actualized in other reality spaces. It is as if within your mind, within your brain, countless times and spaces are generated.

He says:

At any point, you have an infinite system of choices.

At every point you can make choices again; some choices seem better or worse than others. This is a human judgment; he says they seem to be better or worse.

He says:

You must understand that every mental act is a reality for which you are responsible.

This statement is very weighty. In other words, the moment one of your thoughts arises, you have opened up, created a new world for it; you are constantly creating new worlds, new dimensions, new times and spaces, and it is created at the very instant the thought arises. That process was already explained in the previous chapter.

If you cannot understand it, then let me explain briefly. For example, a friend invites you out to dinner and you do not go; you sit at home reading a book -- that thought of going to dinner, that world, cannot be understood by this world of yours, or rather you cannot feel it, you cannot perceive the existence of that world. You can imagine it: you wanted to go to dinner, and he also said earlier that you do not go far, but nevertheless, that time-space and this time-space of yours are already two time-spaces. So the you in that time-space who went to dinner thinks that the you who stayed home reading was only a thought and did not really happen. Both of you think the other is only a probability and did not really happen. So the you in that time-space and the you in this time-space cannot understand each other, although inwardly you do have some process of inner communication.

In other words, of these infinite time-spaces in your mind, you can only perceive one of them. But other people, for example some people of a higher state, or people of a higher level, can perceive those other existences. In other words, why can some people have telepathy? It is because they can read the thoughts in your mind. To other people, to those without the ability, the thoughts in your mind are like another time-space. Others can neither see the thoughts in your mind nor enter into those thoughts. When you are fantasizing about something in your mind, that thing is absolutely relatively independent and exclusive; it exists only in your mind, and others cannot enter it.

But some people can read your thoughts; it is as if they can see your thoughts. At this point, can we not say it is similar to their entering into the time-space within the thoughts in your mind? So to this degree you can understand that we ordinary people do not have this ability, but this ability is actually one that every one of us has. Since you can create a time-space, since you can create a reality according to your thoughts, you can also open up this new reality; you can enter it, or you can choose not to enter it and let it happen in probable time, without your knowing it, unconsciously it happens. That kind of time-space and that kind of thing -- just because you cannot enter it does not mean others cannot enter it.

All right, let us stop here on these questions. His meaning is that you must take responsibility for your mental acts. Taking responsibility means that every thought you have creates a reality, and you are responsible for that reality. That is your purpose within this particular reality system.

For example:

As long as you believe in a devil, you will indeed create one for yourself, and those who believe in it will also continue to create it.

Because others give it energy -- this "it" refers to the devil -- the energy given to the devil, the devil will have its own kind of consciousness. Because you give it energy, you create it in your mind, and others also give it energy, so this devil then has its own consciousness.

But for those who do not believe in the existence of a devil, their belief does not give the devil energy. They simply do not believe in such a thing, so how could they give it energy? Their thought is not projected onto that place. Any projection of your thought is a form of energy. So if they do not believe in this thing, no energy is projected outward.

Such a hypothetical devil does not exist, and has no power or reality.

In other words, the devil is the highest-level illusion. That is, it can have its own consciousness; when you fantasize it into being, it is not only an image, it can also have its own consciousness and obtain energy.

As stated earlier:

Those who believe in hell and assign themselves to hell through their belief will indeed experience hell, but certainly not in any permanent way, for no soul is forever ignorant.

This statement is very crucial: no soul is always ignorant; it can be confused for a time.

Those who have such beliefs actually lack a necessary and deep trust in the nature of consciousness, the soul, and All That Is.

They do not focus their minds on the forces they consider good; instead, they fearfully focus on the forces they consider evil. This is a major problem. Why? They are afraid; fear is a major factor. Therefore many religions, including many groups, use fear and terror to frighten their followers. The purpose of frightening followers is to make you focus your power on these evil things, to conjure up many terrifying things -- devils, hell -- to make you afraid.

These illusions are created by fear and limitation.

Whether the devil or hell, the concept of the devil is only a kind of collective projection of fear. Collective because it is projected by many people, but also limited because there are always some people who do not believe in such things. Not all people; some people believe that there are devils in this world, believe that evil exists in this world.

We actually already introduced this passage in the previous chapter -- the origin of evil, how the devil came into being -- and it was also introduced in the last section of Chapter 15. We will not expand on it here.

He says:

Although some ancient religions understood the illusory nature of the devil concept, even in ancient Egyptian times this simpler and more distorted view that the devil actually existed became popular.

In ancient religions, they knew the devil was only an illusion, not real, but in ancient times, beginning around the Egyptian era, the belief that the devil truly existed had already become popular, especially among the common people rather than among the ancient priests or pharaohs, because they actually knew the devil was an illusion, but ordinary people preferred to accept the devil as real.

In some respects:

People of that time could not understand the concept of God without the concept of a devil.

You see, this statement is very crucial. You first know the devil, and then you know that corresponding to it there is God. This is the same principle explained very clearly in Conversations with God².

He says, for example, storms. Storms are highly creative natural events, although they also cause destruction. Early people only saw the destruction:

Those individuals intuitively understood that any effect is creative, no matter how it may appear, but they could seldom convince their fellows.

Many people tell you that storms in nature are themselves creative; they are not something bad, nor evil, nor deliberate, nor meant to punish humanity. But on the surface they do not look that way: storms bring floods, lightning strikes down trees, and so on, and people think heaven is punishing certain people. So some people know this is not the case, but they cannot convince their fellows; their fellows still believe the storm is a destructive event.

He also says:

The contrast of light and darkness gives us the same kind of picture. We regard good as light, because we feel better and safer in the daytime, and evil is assigned to the night. Within the great distortions, hidden beneath the dogma, there is always the hint that every effect is basically a creation.

He hides this statement beneath the dogma -- the hint that "every effect is basically a creation." Whether it is the devil coming out to harm the world, or the violence of nature, every effect is essentially a creation, and he removes this hint.

Then:

There is no devil waiting to carry anyone off, unless you yourselves create it. If so, then the power resides within you, and not within the hypothetical devil.

If we created that devil, then the devil's power resides within us, not within the hypothetical devil. On this subject, many films and television works also talk about this: the devil's power actually comes from human fear. If humans do not fear it and do not give it this power, the devil immediately loses its power.

If you are interested in this, you can watch a film called Doctor Strange³ -- I think it is called Doctor Strange, it seems to be called Doctor Strange, an American blockbuster adapted from a Marvel comic, a film that is both commercially successful and entertaining, and actually tries to expound a religious or Zen principle. In it, when he finally fights the devil, he traps both himself and the devil in an infinitely looping time. Although the devil can kill him again and again, he can be reborn again and again; he dies and comes back to life, dies and returns, and in the end the devil collapses, because killing him is useless. He keeps wearing the devil down like this, and finally the devil collapses, because he is not afraid of death, and he cannot die.

Actually, every one of us is the same; every one of us fundamentally cannot die. So that difficulty, any difficulty, any devil -- if there is something you fear in your real life, something devilish, just think: if you cannot die, if you can come back again and again, then it will fear you, not you fear it. So this film has a very strong educational significance. In the end the devil compromises; it has no way out, having encountered something like the Foolish Old Man who moved mountains. That Doctor Strange, you can watch it.

He says "the crucifixion." Christ's crucifixion -- the previous chapter said it was a psychological event rather than a truly substantive event, a drama attached to it; it is equivalent to a psychological event, a play.

At that time, it had meaning within your reality.

At that time, in that era, it had meaning. Because more than two thousand years ago, if you wanted to explain principles, science, or theories to people, it was actually very difficult. So in that era, if someone said that for all the sins of humanity he was willing to sacrifice himself, such a noble idea had meaning. Then he also said that he was actually the child of God sent by God, that God sent him to be sacrificed in order to save humanity, to wash away humanity's sins with his blood. All these concepts were very meaningful in that era; we cannot deny their great significance at that time.

It arose from inner reality into the concrete world.

It is now the world of the psyche, the inner world. Your deepest intuitions and insights also originate from this inner reality.

Let us continue, because this has already been discussed a great deal in the previous two chapters. Humanity brought these events out, brought them into reality:

Because it could transmit to the material world this deeper, invisible knowledge of the indestructibility of the soul.

Why was it conveyed in this way? You can imagine: after Christ was nailed to the cross and died, three days later he was resurrected. Christ's resurrection is very crucial -- the Easter we celebrated a couple of days ago refers to Christ's resurrection. Christ's resurrection is a kind of symbol; what did it symbolize? It symbolized the immortality of the soul! This person died, everyone saw him die, and then a few days later he came back to life. Did he not use this method to demonstrate a very primal belief: that the soul is indestructible? He used this method to tell you that death is not something to fear, that the soul is indestructible. So in that age and that era, it had meaning.

To other systems with different basic assumptions, this particular drama would be meaningless.

Divorced from the historical background and historical environment in which Christianity existed, such a drama, if performed, would have no educational significance for the local society and people. At that time, Christianity was already widespread and flourishing, with deep roots among the masses. But the other sects of that time considered Christianity a cult, a heresy, so they wanted to seize the heretics and the leader of the heresy and burn him. So in that particular period, it had educational significance.

Let us continue:

The symbols of rising or falling, light or darkness, would be meaningless to other reality systems with different perceptual apparatus.

For those with different perceptual apparatus -- not our traditional three-dimensional perceptual system, that is, the basic sensations of our nose, eyes, body, tongue, mouth, including the perception of consciousness -- some people have different perceptual apparatus, and for them up, down, left, and right have no meaning.

Although our religion was created around a seed of unassailable truth.

That is, the root of our religion is correct; the root that the soul is eternal is correct. But:

The symbols it uses were chosen quite skillfully by the inner self to fit the basic assumptions that you consider reasonable within this physical universe.

This "inner self" refers to Christ. In the session before last, he said that this Christ can be reflected as our "inner self," and the twelve disciples can be reflected as the twelve characteristics and twelve qualities of us as human beings. So here, this symbol was chosen quite skillfully by this Christ; he used this method of being nailed to the cross -- such a drama -- and then performed the play in accordance with the assumptions we consider reasonable within this physical universe.

Other information, in dreams for example, will generally be given to you with the same symbols.

Other information is also conveyed to us in dreams in similar ways. However:

The symbol itself is only for the use of the inner self; it does not inherently exist within inner reality.

The various symbolic methods adopted by religions, such as the Christian symbol of the crucifixion, are meant for your "inner self" to perceive. But this event does not originally belong within inner reality; it is not an originally existing real inner reality. It is a symbol shown to the inner reality, for the inner reality to perceive.

Many probable systems have perceptions quite different from your own. In fact, some are built upon perceptual gestalts completely foreign to you.

Of course; different worlds, different times and spaces are not the same. For example:

You do not realize that your "ego" is the result of a collective consciousness.

That consciousness which most directly faces the outer world depends upon the minute consciousness residing within every living cell of your body. We cannot feel it, and generally speaking:

You are aware of only one "ego," at least at any one time.

The meaning of this statement is that in some times and spaces, or in some worlds, their perceptual systems are different from ours. For example, we can only perceive one "ego" -- that is, I am me, what I want to do right now, I am hungry, I am thirsty, I want to go out and play; this is all we can perceive, and at any one moment we only know that one moment.

But other reality systems can feel that this so-called "ego" is the result of a collective consciousness, a collection of the minute consciousness of every cell in your body. We cannot perceive the minute consciousness of every living cell; we can only feel our "ego." So he tells you that everyone's perceptual system is different -- every reality system or every world has a different perceptual gestalt and perceptual structure. Therefore religion chooses a perceptual method that we humans can accept in a particular period, and only then does it perform such a symbolic thing.

In some systems, an "individual" can be quite aware of having more than one "self."

In some systems, a single individual can simultaneously feel that he has more than one self, while we cannot perceive this. Although we know that many probable selves exist, that many probable parallel universes exist, and even that many reincarnational selves exist, at any given present moment, at a single specific moment, we can only feel the existence of one self. You cannot perceive these simultaneously. Perhaps in dreams or in other states you can switch, you can communicate with others, but you cannot feel simultaneous existence at the same time. I think you can understand this -- that is, you cannot feel that you are both male and female, that you are both mother and daughter; you cannot have that kind of perception.

In your terms, his entire psychological organization is in some ways far richer than your own.

He says:

You must realize that a "Christ" who did not understand this would not appear in such a system. There are indeed perceptions with which you are unfamiliar; there are indeed worlds in which the concept of light does not exist, where, intuitively speaking, "people" feel almost infinite gradations of "heat" rather than "light."

His meaning is that Christ knows how we humans perceive this world and what our perceptual system is like, so he used a method that we humans of that era could perceive to demonstrate the message he wanted to convey.

In some reality systems, light does not exist for them; they do not know what light is, but they can feel infinite gradations of heat. For us, heat is not that sensitive a sensation; it is just hot, or comfortable, or cold; you do not have a very richly layered perception of heat. But in that space, their perception of heat is extremely sensitive, with infinite gradations.

In any such world, the Christ drama could never be performed as it is in your world.

Because that world has no light; they cannot even see it. If you hang yourself on a cross and burn, they would think you are being continuously irradiated by a mass of light; there is nothing to it. He gives this example to illustrate another principle. What principle? It is this:

The same applies to each of your great religions.

They all performed their own dramas according to the circumstances of the time and the audience or followers of the time; they were all born in response to you. You must remember this -- every religion is the result of a kind of collective telepathy or a collective illusion on our part, just like that of Christ.

Then he talks about Buddhism here. He starts to bring it up on his own, because a lot of people have asked about this, saying that many of Seth's viewpoints and many things are very similar to Buddhism, or very close, or many theories are very consistent, and they say, what exactly is the relationship between Seth and Buddhism, and can it be analyzed and explained separately. So Seth himself starts to talk about it on his own. Although the Buddha would not talk about Seth's matters, Seth will talk about the Buddha's matters.

He says:

Buddhism's description comes relatively close to the essence of reality.

Earlier we often said that quantum mechanics already comes relatively close to the essence of reality. He says Buddhism actually already comes relatively close to the essence, and compared with other religions, Buddhism comes closer to the source of this world. So after many people learn about Buddhism, they feel that Buddhism is simply vast and profound, and it does not seem like a religion; Buddhism seems more like a philosophy, or more like a science. Although it has all the characteristics of a religion, in its essence it does not seem like a religion. Of course, if you have understood Buddhism you should understand this; if you have not understood Buddhism, perhaps you do not know what Buddhism is actually trying to say, and maybe what you see is only the outer appearance: burning incense and kowtowing every day, going to the temple to bow, chanting Amitabha every day. That is the Buddhism you see.

Then he goes on to describe, and this passage may be very important for all those who believe in Buddhism, because he has actually always wanted to compare the relationship between Seth and Buddhism:

However, they did not understand the eternal validity of the soul.

That is to say, Buddhism comes close to the essence of reality, but it still has not reached that essence. As far as the eternal validity of the soul is concerned, as far as its exquisite inviolability is concerned:

Neither could they grasp the feeling for the soul's uniqueness.

But the Buddha, he says:

The Buddha interpreted almost all that he knew of your own reality, and not only of your own physical reality, but also of your own probable physical realities.

That is, he also interpreted the other systems of probabilities.

On this point, he says only this much about Buddhism for the time being. Here he says, "they did not understand the eternal validity of the soul," that is one point; and "as far as its exquisite inviolability is concerned, neither could they grasp the feeling for the soul's uniqueness." These two passages may leave you wondering what he is trying to say. Let me briefly use my own understanding to explain to everyone what this means.

First, we know that Buddhism's theoretical foundation and the conditions under which it arose were built upon a social phenomenon of the ancient India of the Buddha's time. During the Buddha's lifetime, there were many, many religions in India at that time, not just the Buddhism of that period; at that time Buddhism had not become influential at all. At that time, India had numerous sects and all kinds of religions. And at that time, although there were all kinds of religions, they shared one common understanding: the whole of ancient India had one common understanding, that after people die they will reincarnate again. That was one of their viewpoints. This included their belief that after death there are six realms of reincarnation, and this viewpoint was not originally a viewpoint within Buddhism; Buddhism merely borrowed this viewpoint on many occasions. This viewpoint of the six realms of reincarnation was already very widespread before Buddhism, or during the time when Buddhism existed.

And where was the pain point of the people at that time? That is to say, in ancient India the temperature was very hot, and India's climate is still extremely hot even now, and it was the same in ancient times. The environment was also very harsh, living conditions were not good, and average life expectancy was not long. In such an environment, people were very world-weary: life had little pleasure, because most people lived in great poverty, so being alive actually had no meaning. And you know that at that time India also had the caste system. If your surname was very lowly, then you were finished. Unless you had a very high surname, if your surname was low, then you would forever be a lowly person, a person of low status. People were divided into ranks, divided into four ranks. So they also divided the human world into ranks, and they believed that after death people also had to reincarnate into four realms or six realms, divided into heaven, asura, human, animal, hungry ghost, and hell. They believed there were six realms of reincarnation, with three good realms and three evil realms.

Under such circumstances, just think how much suffering people would have had. They were already suffering greatly in this life, and they thought that after death they could be liberated, only to discover that after death there was no liberation, and after death they would come back again as humans, perhaps even worse than human, becoming animals or hungry ghosts and reincarnating again. So their life as a human was unhappy, with no happiness or joy to speak of. Therefore, throughout that widespread India, they had a very pessimistic mood: since life is so bitter, why do I still have to come back after death? When will I be able to stop coming back? They believed that not being reborn after death was a good thing.

This involves people's worldview. Just now Seth also said that the emergence of every religion is determined by the specific historical background of its time and its historical and cultural characteristics. At that time there was just such a viewpoint, and this Hindu view of reincarnation was not the same in other countries or other cultures.

If we classify the views of life and death held by people all over the world, they can roughly be divided into three categories. The first category is the one-life view: a person has only this one life, and after death it is like a lamp going out, and everything is finished. This is what all materialist viewpoints believe. They have done a statistic now, and in mainland China about 80% of people believe that death is like a lamp going out⁴: along with the death of the physical body, everything turns to ashes and vanishes, nothing remains, and there is no soul, no reincarnation, no underworld, no such thing as the courts of the underworld.

But in ancient China, before this new scientific culture came in, people believed in the two-life view. What is the two-life view? Christianity is also a two-life view, and the traditional culture of ancient China was also a two-life view: your current life is this present life, and if in this life you accumulate virtue and do good deeds, do no evil, and obey the rules of your sect, then after death you can ascend to heaven; if you keep doing evil and do bad things every day, then after death you go down to hell.

In ancient times, however, there was no such thing as going down to hell, and in ancient times there was also no such thing as ascending to heaven. In ancient times, everyone went to the underworld, and changed to another place to live. In ancient times the underworld was not hell; it was just like the human world: one was called the world of the living, and the other was called the underworld. The underworld had its own life: the world of the living had houses for the living, and the underworld had houses for the dead, and after people died they went to live in the houses of the dead, living a life there just like the human world. Your ancestors, generation after generation, were all there, and the family enshrined all kinds of spirit tablets. So after death you went back to be reunited with your ancestors. Therefore, if you did something bad in the human world, you were letting down your ancestors: you were letting down your father, your mother, your grandfather and grandmother, all the way up, letting down all your ancestors. In China people often say, "You have done something that lets down your ancestors," and this was the greatest punishment for him. So after death he went to the underworld and lived together again with all his relatives. This was the traditional Chinese viewpoint.

And Christianity believes that after death you either ascend to heaven or descend to hell, which is also a two-life view, and then you live forever in heaven or hell. All Christians will think: if I only have these few decades in the human world to believe in Christianity, believe in the Lord, believe in God, then I only need to obey this for a few decades, and when I die God will come to receive me. When Judgment Day comes, all those who did evil will go down to hell, and I will ascend to heaven, and my ascent to heaven will be permanent. How long is that time? If compared with the human world, one human lifetime is as brief as a flash of lightning in heaven. So you can live forever in heaven. Such a viewpoint is, for many Christians, an extremely good return on investment: I only need to invest these few decades to obtain an eternal life of happiness and a beautiful heavenly life. Therefore, Christians observe their religious rules extremely strictly and believe in Christianity extremely devoutly, because they think this investment of a few decades is worth it. In other words, they are making a deal, making a contract, making a transaction: I use my faith in God to satisfy my future life, and this is a method with an extremely high return on investment.

But Hinduism is different from all the others. Hinduism believes that after death people can come back again. We do not know how they realized this, or whether those ancient Indian masters of spiritual practice opened various inner senses through various methods of meditation; in any case, they discovered such a fact. After they discovered the fact, however, their realization at that level was limited, so they did not know why we have to come back, and they did not understand why I have to come back. They just felt that they knew they had to come back, they knew that after death people would come back again, and they felt this was very boring. So they wanted to ask: can I not come back? Is there some method that would let me not come back after death?

In the India of that time, there was no better method. The methods available in India at that time could only say that in your spiritual practice you must constantly observe the precepts. The precepts of the other religions in India at that time were very strict, and many of Buddhism's precepts were learned from there, not its own original things. Those precepts were also very strict, and there were even cases of eating only one grain of rice a day. Under the premise of observing such precepts, under the premise of obeying these rules, your next rebirth would be better than this life, because you were doing good deeds and performing good acts, so you would get better and better. That is, you could progress from the human realm to the asura realm, and from the asura realm to the heavenly realm. After reaching the heavenly realm, you could remain there for a very, very long time, always reincarnating in the heavenly realm. But the blessings and virtues of the heavenly realm would eventually be exhausted, and when your blessings and virtues were used up, when your rewards were finished, you still had to come back, and come down to the next level again, and then you had to accumulate virtue all over again.

It is somewhat like depositing money in a bank: every good deed you do, every act of giving, every good action, is like depositing money, and when you have deposited enough, in your next life you can enter a higher realm. That was their viewpoint.

So in the entire India of that time, the overall level of understanding was just this one understanding. Under this premise, the Buddha proposed: through spiritual practice, through comprehending this truth, and through attaining supreme perfect enlightenment, you can escape from this sea of suffering, and you no longer need to reincarnate, and you can reach the state of nirvana. In translation it is called "nirvana." You reach a state of nirvana, and you no longer need to come back. So this was the larger background and foundation for the existence of Buddhism at that time.

Therefore, Buddhism believes that if you want to come and study Buddhism, if you want to become a monk or nun, there is one most fundamental premise, the most basic premise: you have already grown weary of life in the human world. You are already thoroughly tired of this bustling world, of these entanglements of love and hate, of all these things, and you no longer want to live. But you still cannot die, and suicide is useless, because after death you will still come back, still reincarnate and return. So under such circumstances, how can you truly be liberated from this matter? Then you can only take refuge in Buddhism, and under Buddhism's practice, under Buddhism's realization and verification, one day you can truly attain the perfect fruit, and then you can enter this purely spiritual state, this state of nirvana, and you no longer need to come back. This is the viewpoint of Theravada Buddhism.

At this point Seth says that he did not understand the eternal, everlasting validity of the soul. That is, he did not understand the meaning of human death. If you could understand it, then since this life is precisely for realization, for experience, for creating in this three-dimensional world, for exercising all your talents, for realizing the value of your soul, then you have regarded it as meaningless. You only want to return to the most primitive state of your soul, and you think that everything in the human world is superfluous and unnecessary. You have forgotten the purpose of the soul and its true value, its validity.

In other words, if the soul is permanent, eternally undying, forever creating, forever creating experience, then when you return to the so-called most primitive Western Pure Land, or to various states of nirvana, are you not still returning to the state of the soul? After returning to that state of the soul, will you not still go on to reincarnate? Perhaps you will not reincarnate in the human world, but you may still have to reincarnate somewhere else, and you may even still come back to the human world to reincarnate. That is, Buddhism's most fundamental defect, or one of the places where it lacks understanding, is this: it does not know the meaning of reincarnation, and it believes that reincarnation is meaningless, which is why it wants to jump out of this reincarnation, to find a shortcut and directly jump out of this system of the reincarnating world.

This is its problem. So its goal is only one, and the goal is too singular: how to stop this reincarnation, how to enter a state beyond reincarnation in the human world, where there is no more reincarnation. Its premise is that the human world is suffering. If the human world is suffering, then ending reincarnation is a good thing. If you do not believe that the human world is suffering, then why would you want to end it? Wherever the soul goes, it is experience; coming to the human world is also a kind of experience, and going to other places is also a kind of experience. Since it wants to come and experience, there is a purpose and meaning in its coming to experience. If you insist on not letting it experience, insist on not letting it reincarnate, then what can it gain?

So this is one of Buddhism's limitations. Buddhism believes that human beings are suffering: birth, aging, sickness, and death, each of these four things is suffering. Birth is suffering, living is suffering, aging is even more suffering: from young and beautiful handsome men and beautiful women, you finally become an old woman or an old man, and no one would regard that as a happy thing, so this is suffering. Sickness is even more suffering, lying in a hospital bed every day moaning and groaning, and that suffering is beyond compare. Death is also suffering, and death is even more suffering. Why? Because after death you will still come back, and is that not another kind of suffering? So it believes that birth, aging, sickness, and death mean this life is forever suffering, and since your whole life is suffering, I will deliver you from this sea of suffering.

Why does it believe this is a sea of suffering? Because it realized that this three-dimensional world is entirely illusion. It believes that you are in this illusion, among a pile of mirrors, struggling every day for things that are basically flowers in water and the moon in a mirror, struggling for fame and fortune, for things that do not actually exist, so are you not just doing meaningless things? That is, it could not realize the meaning of creation and the purpose of experience in this illusory, or phantom-like, or disguise-filled three-dimensional world that we ourselves have created. It believes that since this world is illusion, is unreal, then there is no need for you to waste even one more minute here, and you should leave quickly. It did not understand the meaning within this.

Let me just put it simply like this, because Buddhist theory is also vast and profound, and it is divided into many systems, many schools, and many structures of knowledge. When it teaches its followers, it also adapts to each person, teaching different dharma, different instructions, and different discourses to different people. For example, to believe in Buddhism you must first have a world-weary attitude, this mind of renunciation. Without a mind of renunciation, you cannot begin to practice Buddhism. But some people simply do not have a world-weary mind, and they have not developed a feeling of aversion toward this dazzling world. You cannot force them; they simply have no aversion, so how can you make them feel aversion?

So at this point, for these people, who make up a large portion, Buddhism teaches them systems that are basically called the Human and Heavenly Vehicle. Within the Buddhist system, this category of scriptures is called the Human and Heavenly Vehicle, and among them the main one is the Agama Sutras⁵. The Human and Heavenly Vehicle tells you: how to practice so that in your next reincarnation you will live better than in this life, or at least not worse.

But for those who already have a mind of renunciation, who no longer want to stay even one more day in the human world, it teaches them Theravada Buddhism. What Theravada Buddhism teaches is: how through your own practice you can attain your own awakening, and then enter a state of nirvana, a state from which you will never return, attaining supreme perfect enlightenment. This fruit is called the fruit of the arhat, and then you no longer need to come back.

Then there is Mahayana Buddhism. The viewpoint of Mahayana Buddhism is: not only do you make yourself clear and escape from the sea of suffering yourself, you must also deliver all sentient beings in the world. And these sentient beings are not just human beings; they are all things, all that have form and color, all that are formless and colorless, all that have thought and all that are without thought, whether born from eggs, born from wombs, or born through transformation, all living things in the world. You must deliver them all and free them from the sea of suffering of this physical reality. Those who practice Mahayana Buddhism must not only cultivate themselves well, but must also deliver countless sentient beings. So this is Mahayana Buddhism; it is not for oneself, but for all sentient beings.

And this state of all sentient beings is actually the same as the viewpoint discussed earlier, whether in Seth or in Conversations with God²: the purpose of your coming is to awaken others. Every one of you is inherently complete in ability, every one of you is a part of All That Is, and every person is a realization of the soul. You yourself are in this world: you are both the creator and the created person; you are both the observer and the observed. So this is a very unified viewpoint. If every one of you comes to remind others, and some people say, I do not remind others, I just remind myself, that is also fine. That is the level of Theravada Buddhism.

So let me just say a few extra words here. Today's time is not enough to expand and compare Seth's theory with Buddhist theory. Moreover, these two are built on completely different foundations, and their purposes are different: Buddhism's purpose is to liberate those who are in endless reincarnation, to free them from this sea of suffering, and they have a whole theoretical system for that; while Seth wants to tell you the truth of this world, what the source of this world actually is. There is no question of higher or lower, right or wrong here; it is just that the level of understanding was different in different eras.

In other words, if you were facing the toiling masses of India two thousand five hundred years ago, people who struggled every day just to have enough to eat, who exhausted all their strength just to stay alive, and you went to tell them about the meaning of life, to tell them about higher realms, to tell them that such a life is good and that such life experience is meaningful, then you would have departed from the background of that era and from the environment of that era. No one would listen to your preaching.

You can imagine what India is like now. I think you probably also know what kind of state India is in now. If you have not been to India, then if you went to India you would understand. I have been to India, I stayed in India for two months, I know roughly what India is like, and I traveled from east to west. When you arrive in India you can grasp this meaning, and then think about what India was like two thousand five hundred years ago.

At that time, I think the Buddha was already very great. He was able, in that era, two thousand five hundred years ago, to see that this material world itself is illusory, that it is not truly existent, that it is like a flash. So the Buddha's understanding of this world was not wrong at all: these views of the world, how the material world came to be, and so on, were all not wrong. His only point is this: he did not realize the meaning of the soul's coming into reincarnation, where its essential meaning lies. That is what he did not realize. Second, he did not know that the soul itself is eternal, that it is simply a soul, and that its purpose is always a soul. Even after death, when you go back, you are still a soul; it cannot become something else. He did not have a deep realization of this, and he believed that after death you might become a cat or a dog, going down level by level, and so on, and then he kept trying to save you.

Overall, they have many, many similarities, but there are also many, many differences. So people who are new to studying Seth will feel that Buddhism and Seth have many similar places, but after you study further and go deeper and deeper, you will discover that there are many differences between them. The differences mainly lie in the different audiences they face, and the purposes and missions they bring and wish to convey are also different. Seth wants more to explain clearly what the original face of this world is like, and he does not actually regard the sufferings in your life as suffering. He says that all these things in your life are very good experiences, and there is nothing to suffer about; you do not need me to teach you some method every day so that you no longer have to endure the suffering of the present. But Buddhism is not like that. Buddhism believes that first of all this is illusion, and it is suffering, and you are suffering within illusion. It is like having a nightmare, and you keep having this nightmare over and over and over, so I will wake you up, and you should not keep having nightmares. You are a dream, I tell you, and the world around you is all a dream. Only when you have the supreme wisdom of perfect enlightenment can you leave the dream and wake up, and after waking up you will no longer suffer. So why should you keep cycling through one nightmare after another in this nightmare?

The Buddha's intention was very good and very kind, and he had no ill will. He actually just thought: why should you suffer in a nightmare? That is one point. But he actually did not know that this nightmare itself also has meaning, and has its own practical significance.

All right, let us stop here for this part. If in the future we have the opportunity to touch on some viewpoints that differ from Buddhism, we can elaborate on them then. For now let us speak briefly, because this is the first time Seth has talked about some of his views on Buddhism, and I think it is also a point that many people care about.

He says:

Those methods, the secret methods behind all religions, their meaning is to lead a person into a realm of understanding that exists beyond symbols and stories, to bring him to inner illuminations within and beyond the physical world as he knows it.

He says that all these religions, all these methods, have only one purpose: through the meaning of symbols, to guide you into a system of awareness beyond symbolic meaning, within you or outside you. To let you both recognize the illusory nature of this three-dimensional world, and know the meaning of its existence, and know the true meaning of the world that exists behind this illusory world: that is, the world of probabilities and the systems of probabilities, and also the true nature of your own essence, the true nature that you yourself are a soul, a three-dimensional manifestation. In other words, to let you understand, through symbols and through these stories, the things I just mentioned.

He says:

In the old monasteries, particularly in Spain, there are still, even now, many undiscovered manuscripts.

At the time he wrote the book in 1971. Speaking of the Catholic religious orders, that is, the underground groups of the church, they still have many. We all know about the Knights Templar, and all kinds of other orders and societies, and the Freemasons. We will not go into them. Many secret groups, while other monks were copying ancient Latin manuscripts, that is, copying the orthodox scriptures, these ancient groups were responsible for keeping these secret methods going.

He says:

There were tribes in Africa and Australia in the past who never learned to write, but they also knew these secret methods.

You see, he is talking about Spain, where they were transmitting these secret methods, but Australia and Africa were cut off from Europe, so how did they know them? Those indigenous people had not learned to write and were illiterate, so how did they know these secret methods? Why? It is because there were people called "Speakers" who memorized these secret methods and spread them northward, even across northern Europe before the time of Christ.

There is a great deal of historical background here. If you study ancient civilizations and ancient history, there are many, many records from that time: how the most primitive religions, beginning with shamanism and so on, spread to all parts of the world, and how religion spread, all had their own routes of transmission. Today we are not talking about the history of religion, so we will not go into that. If you are interested, you can look it up.

He says Rob asked him:

Could you dictate one of those Speakers' manuscripts?

Those Speakers were secretly transmitting some secret methods, and Rob asked Seth whether he could dictate one at random so that we could also see it. Seth said:

That is possible, but it would take much time, and would require the best of circumstances.

He did not say it so explicitly, but he meant, first, that even if I spoke, you would have to be able to understand it, and second, that I cannot just produce it on demand. He added in passing:

The work involved might take five years.

If you ask me to speak it, I might first need to spend five years of human time preparing this material. Because there are several kinds of Speakers, and the Speakers had many schools, and there was more than one leader, and each taught different methods to their people.

He says:

Because of these groups, the world was far more ready for Christianity than people suppose, for these concepts had been "planted" all over the European continent.

Because those ancient Speakers and those ancient secret groups existed, by the time Christianity began to spread, it already had a very large popular foundation, because the concepts had already been buried -- that is, hidden in people's hearts. "Buried" is the word Seth wanted to write here, and he emphasized that he wanted to use exactly this word.

He said Seth had mentioned the Speakers once before. He had mentioned them once in Session 558, and after that he had not talked about these matters again. He said:

However, many important concepts have been lost.

This is indeed a fact. Although the Speakers were still speaking, some important concepts had already been lost, and what became emphasized instead were practical methods for living -- by now many esoteric methods have all become ways of materially improving one's life. For example, cultivating the golden elixir, cultivating an elixir of immortality, and so on, to give examples, along with all sorts of other methods. The principles that were very simply understood, these could be turned into practical solutions for improving life, but people forgot the principles behind them.

We have far too many of these things in our reality, far too many. In ancient China there were many, in the West there were many, including many, many that I will not go through one by one. In ancient times, whether you look at the Huangdi Neijing⁶ or the body's meridians and channels, even now people still do not know how people knew about these meridians and acupoints, how they used these herbs to treat illness, where the principles of herbal medicine and the theory of yin-yang and the five phases came from, the Hetu and Luoshu, the Zhouyi, the eight trigrams, and so on and so forth -- all of these are very ancient things, and no one knows where they came from. Many of these things cannot be traced back to their source.

So we will not expand on this further. But later on, gradually, these things had already been turned into something practical for life, and we no longer know the principles behind them. For example, the Zhouyi⁷ contains very profound principles. The eight trigrams, for instance, include the prenatal trigrams and the postnatal trigrams. Why are there prenatal and postnatal, and where do the prenatal changes lie, and why do the postnatal trigram changes occur -- present-day humanity no longer pays attention to any of this. But we humans take the eight trigrams and use them for divination and fortune-telling, and it can be extremely accurate -- anyone who has had their fortune told will know that if the person is truly highly skilled, the reading can be so accurate it frightens you. We have turned it into something practical, and forgotten why its principles work; we no longer know.

He said that in ancient Europe, he said:

The Druids obtained some concepts from the Speakers. So did the Egyptians. The Speakers predate any religion of which you have knowledge.

The Speakers predate any religion you can know of. First there were the Speakers, and only afterward did religions come into being. The religion of the Speakers arose simultaneously in many scattered places, and yet spread like wildfire from the heartland of Africa or Australia. Had he not said earlier that this esoteric teaching first began to spread in a primitive region of Spain, but later was obtained by some primitive tribal peoples in Australia or Africa? Although they had no writing, although their civilization had not yet developed a written script, they already knew the content of the Speakers, and from them the primitive religions began to spread outward.

Among the later Aztecs -- the Aztecs, that is -- if you study ancient cultures, you will find they were the indigenous people living in the central region of Mexico -- there was a separate group at that time. Although at that time the land masses were not the same as they are now, and some of the lower cave dwellings were occasionally still submerged beneath the water.

He said there were various different groups of Speakers, so it was not just one person; they passed it down from generation to generation. Because they were trained so well, the information maintained its authenticity. These Speakers passed it down through the generations, and they underwent very specialized training, so their information remained quite authentic, quite undistorted.

However:

They believed it was wrong to put the spoken word into written form.

They knew that putting this method of transmitting the teaching into written form was wrong. Therefore, for this reason, they did not record it. They transmitted it more through oral transmission from mouth to mouth, or through telepathic transmission.

They also used the natural symbolism of the land.

They used certain symbolism of the land -- including our heavenly stems and earthly branches, including the twenty-four solar terms, and so on; these are all characteristics related to the land. Including our eight trigrams, our eight trigrams are also related to the land: there is heaven and earth, water, fire, thunder, quake, and so on; these are all things related to nature, to heaven and earth. He used many of those things, but he clearly understood the reasons for doing so -- he knew why he did it. He used the earth as symbol, used heaven and earth as symbols; he did not use words as symbols. He did not write words; he used pictures, images.

So now you know why the ancient Hetu and Luoshu, the prenatal eight trigrams, and also the yin-yang diagram -- why they used a diagrammatic form, why they did not write out a lengthy explanation of the reasons and principles behind it all. Now you understand: it was not that they would not explain, but that they did not want to use words. They said using words was wrong.

So now you know why, when the Buddha was at the point of death, he said: I have transmitted the teaching all my life, but in fact I have transmitted no teaching at all. That is the first point. Second, he said: do not erect statues of me -- the Buddha's name and form; do not erect images, because if you erect images, people will become attached to forms. I am a person who breaks attachment to forms; I came into the world to transmit the teaching precisely in order to break attachment to forms, and then you go and erect an image of me, which completely contradicts my view. And also, do not establish written words. Therefore the Buddha did not leave behind a single written word.

Why was it meaningless? He said, for example, when I taught Subhuti, I taught only according to Subhuti's understanding at that time and his level of comprehension at that time. If it had been another person, I might have had to teach in a different way. Therefore the Buddha also said: I have eighty-four thousand Dharma gates, and each one can lead you to realization, each one can lead you to awakening. So the teaching I gave to each individual person was different. If later generations take the knowledge I gave to Zhang San and Li Si, to so many different people, and rigidly apply it to yourselves or to other people, and you hope to attain realization through this method, then that is wrong. That was his view. Therefore his final instruction was: do not establish written words, do not establish images of the Buddha. This was the Buddha's final injunction.

But you know that worldly people simply did not listen to him. After he died, his disciples and others did not follow his instructions: after he died, more than a thousand of his disciples gathered together and said, the teacher transmitted the teaching for so many years, and we have all become awakened through his teaching, we have all attained various stages of fruition, so this proves that the Buddha's teachings are useful, and we cannot let them be lost; we must record them. So they sat together and recorded every sentence the Buddha had spoken, and then they verified it against one another -- saying that on a certain day in a certain month, the Buddha in such-and-such a place spoke with so-and-so about such-and-such a matter, and this is what he said, and after he said it, another group of people who had also been present at the time had to confirm it, verifying it point by point. They divided into many, many groups, and spent many years re-organizing and recording the forty-five years of the Buddha's teaching during his lifetime. This is the most primitive Buddhist scripture we see today.

And these scriptures were so precious that later, many kings in India knew the scriptures had been written, and so they came to fight over the completed scriptures, feeling that what the Buddha had left behind must be extremely precious. Then there appeared the story of the eight kings dividing the scriptures, and many other historical stories about dividing up the scriptures, and so on. Later, this included Xuanzang's journey to India to obtain the scriptures⁸ and a whole series of stories -- not stories, but real historical events. I will not go into all of that.

The point of saying all this is actually this: these Speakers all understood that these things cannot properly be transmitted through words. Once spoken into words, they have already lost their original meaning, and therefore they required that nothing be written down. So you see that many ancient things are not in written form, or they were transmitted secretly and not passed on to outsiders.

He said:

The Speakers existed individually in your Stone Age.

By our Stone Age they already existed, which is even more ancient. Moreover:

They were leaders.

They were also the tribal leaders of that time. So now you know that in fact the earliest ones, like the Yellow Emperor, the Yan Emperor, and all those, including the legends in the very early Investiture of the Gods⁹, including Yao, Shun, and Yu -- could they perhaps all have been Speakers? It is possible. He already said it: by the Stone Age they already existed, and they were already leaders.

Their abilities, because they had obtained this ancient knowledge, this primitive knowledge, enabled these cave dwellers to survive.

So the reason we humans have survived to this day is because of the existence of these secret Speakers. So where did the theories of Chinese medicine, the theory of the meridians, the Huangdi Neijing⁶, and all those things come from? We do not know. We can all hypothesize whether these were passed down by these Speakers. It was under those ancient conditions of lacking medicine and doctors, under those harsh natural conditions, that we were able to survive until now.

However:

In those times there was little actual communication between the various Speakers.

It was not like now, with cell phones and the internet, where we can communicate with each other, create a group, and transmit the teaching together. No. They did not know of each other's existence. Some of them did not know that other Speakers existed. Were there some who did know? Of course. Once they reached a certain level, they could sense each other through telepathy or through methods that transcend time and space. But some may not have reached such a high state, and they did not know; they only knew themselves.

Their information was as pure and undistorted as possible, but for this very reason, over the generations many who heard the information turned it into parables and stories.

The information they transmitted was as pure and undistorted as possible, and so later generations, over the ages, turned it into parables or stories, because in this way it could be as simple and direct as possible, without producing any distortion.

He said, speaking of the present:

Much of the Jewish scriptures still carry some faint traces of the messages of these early Speakers.

In the Jewish scriptures there are still faint traces. Even so, those things have already been distorted, and the original information has been hidden.

Here, Rob at this point quoted some materials from that time. He said that in some reference works on the Bible¹⁰, when discussing Israel and early history, a great deal is said about oral tradition. Oral transmission preceded written records by several centuries, and also contributed to the formation of the written text:

During this long period of oral transmission, many distortions occurred for various reasons. Recent research shows that the early collection and recording of traditions goes back to the twelfth century BC¹¹.

That is, three thousand two hundred years ago. If you want to find the records of these oral traditions, you have to trace them back to that era. These subsequently led to the writing of the books of the Bible¹⁰. If you understand the Bible¹⁰, you know: if you look at the Bible¹⁰ scientifically, without any prejudice, not in the superstitious way that says not a single word of the Bible¹⁰ can be changed, that the Bible¹⁰ is entirely true -- if you look at the Bible¹⁰ scientifically, then you know that the Bible¹⁰ developed into its present form through a very ancient process, and in between there were countless people who revised and edited it. We will not expand on this. There is a great deal of discussion and research about the origin and history of the Bible¹⁰; this is what Westerners are most interested in.

He said:

Since consciousness forms matter, and not the other way around, then thought existed before the brain.

What he means is that thought existed before the human brain was formed. And when the brain no longer exists, when a person has died, thought still exists.

He then gave an example to prove his point:

A child can think coherently before he learns words.

That is to say, thought exists before words, before language, and he can still think coherently. But:

He cannot leave his mark in the physical universe with intangible thoughts.

In this physical universe, such intangible thoughts and thinking, if they are not turned into words, or into some actual material expression, cannot leave any mark. Therefore, when we now do archaeology on ancient times, we can only find those things that have writing, that have records, that have marks.

He said:

Therefore this inner knowledge was always there.

What he is telling you with this example is that a child first has thought and only then has words, so in fact he is telling you: before this -- before there was a human brain, before there was human thought -- that original thought had long existed. It was always there, just waiting to become concretely realized. Just as a thought must become words, just as an idea must be spoken aloud, that thought needed to be concretely realized, needed to truly be given flesh and blood -- this is a double meaning: to truly give flesh and blood is to truly give that thought a life. In other words, only with the existence of actual people, of people in the physical world, could those original thoughts become a way of leaving marks in the physical world.

He said:

The Speakers were the first to impress this inner knowledge upon the physical universe.

They impressed that most ancient, primitive knowledge upon the physical universe, making it visibly manifest in the human world. Why could it emerge? Because there were people speaking it; a person is itself evidence of existence, itself a mark. Later it would form certain symbols, or use the earth as a mark, and so on. It would continue to be passed down orally, becoming part of human history.

He said:

Sometimes only one or two Speakers were alive in several centuries.

Sometimes in several hundred years there were only one or two Speakers alive; at other times there were many.

These Speakers, looking around them, knew at once -- with one glance around they knew:

The world leaped out from their inner reality.

They told this to others -- that reality is created by thought. What did they tell those around them? They said:

The seemingly solid natural objects around them were composed of many minute consciousnesses.

That is, matter is composed of consciousness. They realized:

From their own creativity, they formed concepts into matter.

They themselves knew that they could creatively turn concepts into matter. And:

The ingredients that composed matter were themselves conscious.

The ingredients that compose matter are themselves conscious; matter is composed of units of consciousness, so it is alive; matter itself is alive -- even a nail is alive.

Therefore:

They knew very well the natural fusion that existed between themselves and their environment, and therefore they knew that they could alter their environment through their own actions.

They were very familiar with this matter, so they knew that they could change the environment around them through their own thoughts or actions.

At this point he had finished this session. What he mainly talked about here was that the ancient esoteric teaching already existed before the development of human civilization, and it was passed down through the Speakers all along; the ancient religions and the later religions were all passed down from this.

He said today's teaching ends here. Then afterward Rob asked a question:

Is Ruburt a Speaker?

He had just been talking about the Speakers, so he asked whether Ruburt is now speaking. Seth said:

Ruburt is.

He said, what about you? Seth said:

I am indeed, I am also one. And there are two more whom you know. One of them was mentioned in the ESP class, and the other is yourself.

Rob said:

I really did not expect that. I really did not expect that I am a Speaker.

He said:

As for Speakers in the process of reincarnation, in any given life they may or may not use their abilities, and may or may not be aware of their abilities.

What he means is that when Speakers reincarnate in the human world, they do not know in every lifetime that they are Speakers. Sometimes they know, sometimes they themselves do not know; sometimes they can use it, sometimes they cannot. So it is not as people imagine, that a Speaker is born into the world in lifetime after lifetime and immediately begins speaking the teaching. So you also know that the Buddha said he had reincarnated many times -- in one reincarnation he was a tiger, and so on; I will not go into these matters. In these processes, what he is actually telling you is this: sometimes these Speakers cannot be recognized in the human world; they are just like ordinary people, they have no special abilities, and they do not go about speaking the teaching.

Then he said, you must remember, and as a footnote:

There are thousands of Speakers.

Here he deliberately emphasized this one sentence -- he was afraid that Jane or Rob would proudly think: I am a Speaker, I am somehow different from everyone else. Here he said that Jane remembered Seth saying that both of them had once been Speakers, and she could only remember this in her trance state. She had a quick, almost incredulous reaction:

That would be too flattering.

She felt that Seth was flattering the two of them too much. Then she herself felt Seth come back, and right after the session ended he emphasized one last time -- there are thousands of them. This made the fact that both of them had once been Speakers, and the matter of now producing the Seth material, no longer anything special. He did not want her to feel that the two of them were anything special.

After the session, Rob wondered:

Whether the Seth material itself is a distorted version of the Speakers' information?

Because he had said that this teaching cannot be expressed through language and words, and once it is spoken it is already wrong. So he was asking: could it be that the Seth material itself is a distortion of the Speakers' information? That it is already not the real thing. And Jane said this was quite possible. In fact, Jane's feeling was this: the material of the Speakers was more poetic. Jane believed that if it were the original material of the Speakers, not this material distorted through Seth, it should be more poetic -- because Jane herself was a poet, and she believed that the true teaching, when spoken, is something as beautiful as poetry.

That is their personal judgment, and we will not judge it. This is not Seth's view; it is the couple's own discussion after the session ended, and you can take it as a reference.

Seth Speaks Chapter 17 Commentary (Session 569)

This session continues the topic of the speakers from the previous session, moving from his (Seth's) working conditions into the later discussion of the working levels of consciousness.

Session 569

Generally speaking, in your terms... in our terms, once you are a "Speaker," you are always a Speaker.

Why does he say "in our terms"? Because we have a sequential concept of time -- we have this idea of reincarnation, a previous life, a next life. If this person is a Speaker, then he will always be a Speaker.

In certain reincarnations, this Speaker may use this ability of his own very powerfully: he can travel across various levels of consciousness, and he can enter all kinds of reality spaces. So much so that all the other aspects of this personality -- this personality has other abilities besides being a Speaker -- all remained in the background, hidden and not apparent. In other reincarnational processes, these talents may be used very timidly -- in some reincarnations he will use part of this ability, and in some reincarnations he will not use it at all.

Speakers all possess extraordinarily active senses and projections of mental power.

Mental power is this kind of projection of intention. These Speakers all possess such abilities. They can give people deeper impressions through communication, and they can easily shift from inner reality to outer reality.

What does it mean to shift from inner reality to outer reality? It means that some of his inner psychological structures or psychological thoughts can, through the means of communication, allow other people to perceive this existence. Because communication itself is an outer reality -- communication requires interacting with others, and that is outer reality -- but it comes out of inner reality.

They instinctively know how to use symbols.

He instinctively knows how to use symbolic things to convey what he wants to tell others, not through direct oral narration or written description, but through symbolic means. You know what he said in the last session -- what symbol did Jesus use? He used the symbol of being nailed to the cross and burned¹², and then resurrecting, to convey the message he wanted to convey. Other religions use other methods and other symbols.

On unconscious levels, they are highly creative, constantly forming psychic frameworks beneath normal consciousness.

He is highly creative on the level of people's unconsciousness. On this level of consciousness of which you are unaware, he will form very complex psychological structures.

What this passage means is that when Christianity first began to spread, those Speakers had already planted a very good foundation in the minds of the people. By the time Christ was alive in the world teaching the dharma, the people already had a certain mass foundation, and that is why it was transmitted so well. This process is the Speakers having already planted such psychological structures beneath the people's consciousness, in a state where you are unaware.

For their own use with those they wish to communicate with, in dreams or in states of trance.

He establishes a psychic structure without your awareness, and this structure is for the convenience of himself and you to use in dreams or in trance states -- the two of you need to have a level where your psyches meet.

They often appear in the dreams of others, helping to manipulate inner reality within dreams.

He enters other people's dreams, appearing in various images and incarnations. Sometimes in dreams he appears like God, sometimes like the Buddha, the Bodhisattva, Maitreya Buddha -- there are all kinds of ways of manifesting.

They personify themselves as images the dreamer can relate to, images that can be used as bridges, and then use them as doorways.

Through this image you can go further and deeper into your inner reality. Many people say, when I was meditating or sitting in stillness I met my teacher -- that guru is not a living Buddha or Rinpoche in reality, but a teacher who appeared on that level of mine. That image is a doorway, and that teacher is the one who leads you through the door. Once you truly enter, it is up to yourself, but you need such a person to serve as a bridge to lead you in.

Through this doorway, helping people enter consciousness that is further removed from your own consciousness.

Your consciousness is layered. What you can be aware of right now is your most shallow surface consciousness. Beneath the surface consciousness there is the subconscious, and beneath the subconscious there is that unconscious state you cannot be aware of at all, and within that unconscious state there are many, many more layers. So it will bring you into those consciousnesses that are very far removed from your current surface consciousness.

The symbolic meaning of the gods, at the ford of the River Styx.

The idea of the gods at the ford of the River Styx -- the River Styx is what we call the river separating the realms of yin and yang, or the Chinese Bridge of Helplessness. These are all symbols. That kind of phenomenon, whether it is the Bridge of Helplessness, the River Styx, the flowers of the other shore, or deities, or God -- these are all symbols.

These symbols were originated by the Speakers.

Religious symbols and frameworks must not exist only in the physical world.

Religious symbols and religious systems must not exist only in the physical world; they must also exist in the unconscious world. The outer world of religion that you see -- temples, images, stories, legends -- these are outer material things. But the symbols and frameworks of religion must also have an unconscious world on this level of your unconsciousness, corresponding to the physical world. Only then can such a religion truly come into being.

In other words, all devout believers who have believed in Christianity have an actual feeling: when they encounter difficulties, they can truly feel God helping them. Although sometimes they cannot see this image, they can feel it -- the feeling is that God sent someone to help them, that God appeared and became a certain person.

A couple of days ago I saw a video shared by a netizen in a LINE group: a Christian believer got COVID-19, and had reached the point where he was almost dying. His consciousness was already blurred, and his consciousness had already left his body and was floating. In that state he prayed to God, begging God to help him. After a little while, a janitor came -- a middle-aged Black man from Nigeria who cleaned the hospital. Normally a janitor finishes cleaning and leaves, but this janitor was very strange. He sat down and started chatting with him, making small talk: "How are you feeling? How are you doing now?" As they talked, the man shifted the topic and said that he had been preaching in Nigeria for fifteen years. Then he told him about God's love for him, God's help for him, and the importance of God. Because the patient was also a Christian and very much in agreement, the two of them talked very well together.

Finally, before the janitor left, he said: "Would you allow me to pray for you? Let me pray for you while you pray, so that you get better soon." He said of course, of course. They did not say much more than that -- just this simple exchange -- and then the janitor left.

After he left, the man felt much better that very night. During the day he had already been close to death, but that night he felt himself improving. The most miraculous thing was that his appetite came back -- one of the greatest dangers of COVID-19 is that it makes your sense of taste disappear first. Many COVID patients' first symptom is losing their sense of taste; nothing they eat has any flavor. At this point he had his sense of taste back and his appetite back. He wanted to eat something, a kind of chip-like crispy snack, which proved his body was recovering.

The next day, when that janitor passed by his hospital bed, he kept giving him a thumbs-up. When the janitor came to see him the next day, he had already improved a lot and already wanted to eat. The janitor pulled out an orange and a small can of Coke from his pocket, and also brought him the crispy snack he had wanted to eat that night. He said this was especially miraculous -- how did he know I wanted to eat this? Actually, when his appetite was returning, he had also thought about Coke and the taste of oranges. These were all things he had thought about, and what he most wanted to eat was that crispy snack. When all of these things appeared before him, he felt that this janitor was the incarnation of God, that God had sent him to save him.

Later he recorded a video himself and posted it online. He was still lying in the hospital, but he had basically almost recovered and was about to be discharged. When he recorded the video, his eyes were brimming with tears, full of hot tears. That was a completely genuine feeling -- he felt that God had manifested before him.

Why am I giving this example? I am saying that the existence of religion is not only about having churches, temples, and rituals. In the depths of every person's heart, in the subconscious, there are also some invisible frameworks that you cannot feel at all. The symbols of religion are not just the outer images of Christ, the cross, temples, Guanyin Bodhisattva, and so on -- not just those. They exist in every person's inner world -- in a world of your unconsciousness, there still exists a framework there, and its symbolism as well. Many Buddhists, in times of great difficulty, will feel as if Guanyin has appeared in the world to save them. There are too many examples of this, so I will not go on. You understand what he means by this.

He goes on to explain why this is so:

Outside of your own frameworks, things like houses or dwellings are not necessary.

We have already become another level. On the nonphysical level, we do not need houses. But in your trance states, or in dreams, or when meeting in other realities -- when you go to these realities, you will often see such structures: houses, buildings, and many plots and stories all take place indoors. It is very strange. They are actually not needed. Why do such frameworks still exist?

Because they are symbolic; they are a way of translating data into something meaningful to you.

Houses carry a certain symbolism. He uses the example of houses to tell you this: those things beneath your subconscious, when you enter trance states or enter dreams -- those are all your unconscious states -- or even when you may enter other dimensional spaces in completely unrelated states, why are there still houses and buildings in those states? This is because in your deep unconscious states there are many symbolic things. He uses this to tell you why those religious symbolic things exist in your unconsciousness. It is the same meaning.

For example, after death, a person or a group of people may continue to create these houses until they themselves realize that this framework is no longer necessary.

In Chapter 9, Chapter 10, Chapter 11, and probably all the way to Chapter 12, we have been discussing this world after death. In the hallucinations after death, there will still be these houses. Until one day they truly discover that these post-death hallucinations are based on the frameworks left over from their old state of consciousness -- the framework being that there must be houses and buildings -- they will discover that in the new space-time, or in the new dimensional space, those things are no longer needed, and only then will they truly give them up. Otherwise, they will carry the viewpoints of the old consciousness with them.

Therefore, the activities of the Speakers are not limited to the waking hours. They are around the clock, day and night, fulfilling their responsibilities in both the waking and dreaming states simultaneously.

Because this framework beneath your subconscious is very important. So he not only has to explain principles to you during the day, but at night he also has to go into your dreams to teach you the dharma. Why? As was said earlier, in your unconsciousness, in many of those frameworks and systems, you still have many incorrect frameworks that you should give up or change, and he has to communicate with you in there.

You say he must be very tired, right? He is helping you on both the conscious level and the unconscious level, not just one aspect. Why do I say this? It is very simple. If you have entered a higher state -- he has explained it clearly to you in the conscious state: you need to communicate with your inner self, and you need to carry out exercises to expand the inner senses. But after you communicate with your inner self, if you discover that some of the frameworks and concepts inside your inner self are still old things, then when you enter there you still will not make much progress. So he is simultaneously making some adjustments to the things inside your inner self, and then when your outer self wants to enter the inner self and communicate with it, there will be better progress and better learning opportunities.

In fact, most of the most important data is remembered by the trainees during dreams.

The important data is actually learned while you are dreaming.

It is passed on in this way as well. This unwritten data is illustrated with pictures during dream travels or field trips into other realities.

These are all unrecorded, without words, all passed down in dreams. When you enter other levels of reality, or travel in dreams, or in the process of field investigation, he transmits this most important data to you in the form of pictures, so that you remember it.

So we see in many historical accounts or actual interviews, many people say, "I had a dream, and I could not remember clearly what was in the dream, but after I woke up I knew how to do such and such." Many people gain many, many things in dreams, but to others it sounds like a magical story. Here he tells you that this is real.

This training is still going on.

This training in dreams is going on every night for each of you right now.

The individual psychic frameworks or story frameworks may differ.

Every person is different. This Speaker may make use of popular Christianity -- that is, the most ordinary, mainstream Christianity in society -- appearing in the image of God and the saints.

So many Christians will say, "I have dreamed of God," or "I have seen God," or in some state of wakefulness, in a half-asleep half-awake state, in a trance state, many people will tell you, "I saw God, I really saw God," or saw angels, or "I saw John, I saw Peter." No matter who he saw, it was the Speaker using that image. He is an incarnation. He is not the real God, nor the real saints. These are actually the Speakers using these images to manifest something to you.

And these are all extremely vivid.

God is exactly the same as the God you imagine, and the same goes for the angels and the saints.

The dreamer may find himself in an extremely magnificent palace, or in a brilliantly shining field.

He will enter this state and see those gods or saints.

Some Speakers limit their abilities to dreams, and in the waking state they are mostly unaware of their own abilities and experiences.

Some Speakers limit their ability to teach the dharma only to dreams. During the day they look no different from ordinary people, and they themselves do not know they have this ability, but in dreams, in their own unconscious states, they go and do this work of teaching. When they wake up they do not know -- mostly they do not know in the waking state, and only a very few still know. So most Speakers are like this: when they are awake they do not teach, and you cannot feel that they are Speakers. This is very interesting.

It is meaningless to call such dreams or the locations in dreams illusions.

It is meaningless for you to tell these people that the God in their dreams is an illusion, that he is an incarnation of a Speaker. Saying that to them has no meaning at all.

Because for you, they are a description of an exact objective reality whose true face you cannot yet see.

For those people who dream of these deities, these illusions actually represent an exact description of objective reality for them. They cannot see the true face; what they see is this illusion. At this point you should not tell them that these illusions are all fake -- because this illusion itself has a certain educational significance, and at this stage they can only see this. If you want to tell them the truth behind these illusions, in their state and frame of mind at that time, they cannot accept it.

The religion of ancient Egypt was largely built upon the efforts of the Speakers.

We see that the temples and pyramids in Egypt today, including the things carved inside them, including those sacrificial activities, were largely built upon the efforts of the Speakers.

They spent great effort training the Speakers, yet the outer display given to the masses became so distorted.

Although they spent a lot of time training the Speakers, what the Speakers displayed outwardly was very distorted, not a true objective reality. Just as he said earlier, there would be various illusions, various deities, various miraculous things. So ancient Egypt had many strange and bizarre gods, including the Sphinx -- you know the Sphinx is only one of them. There were many others. Their pharaohs all had to wear a mask, and those masks all looked like that. We will not display these further. Although the religion of ancient Egypt was established through the efforts of the Speakers, there was great distortion when they presented it to the masses, so the masses had a mistaken conception of them.

So much so that the original unity of that religion finally deteriorated.

What is unity? It is that every person actually possesses divinity. This is the most basic unity of religion -- the viewpoint of religion is to let you find your way back to yourself, to recognize yourself, that you yourself are the god of this world. They destroyed this point. They believed that God is God, and you are you. Human beings exist like ants, like insignificant creatures, and between you and the deities there is an indescribable distance and chasm. You can only forever prostrate yourself on the ground, and toward the gods and God you can only forever worship. They can never be equated with you. So from the very beginning of that most primitive religion, they were already corrupting this unity.

But at that time, they attempted to map out inner reality in ways that have never been attempted since.

They attempted a method that has never been attempted again since -- they strove to draw out the inner reality of human beings, to depict it. Just like wanting to draw out your dreams, they wanted to draw it out on that level of inner reality.

In dreams and in other levels of existence close to the human world, there is great individual latitude in the creation of forms and the application of symbols.

In dreams or in those levels of consciousness close to the human world, in those half-awake half-confused states, in the creation of forms and the excellent application of symbols, every person is completely different. He wanted to draw out each person's inner world. We humans have an outer world, as we all know, composed of shared illusions -- you and I both agree that it is a table, and only then is it a table. We have said this before. The outer material world has an outer world collectively agreed upon by the group; it is not recognized by you alone, but recognized by everyone together, so it is a collective illusion. Besides this, he wanted to depict the reality of each person's inner world. But each person's inner reality is completely differentiated and individualized; its images and symbolic representations are all somewhat different.

But on the other hand, all of this occurs within an objectively exact environment, an environment that has the characteristics that make such phenomena possible, and that field of activity possesses its own rules.

Although each person has different manifestations, different symbols, and different signs for inner reality, these inner environments must occur within a relatively "objective" -- he puts "objective" in quotation marks, meaning it is actually not objective -- an exact environment. They must occur on the deepest level of consciousness of the unconscious. It is also a level of consciousness; he will talk about this later, so we will not expand on it now. On a certain level of consciousness, which we can understand as a certain level beneath the subconscious and deeper into the unconscious, those inner thoughts and inner reality spaces have a space in which to unfold, and only there can your beliefs create reality. Within that there are certain regularities -- that field of activity, you can treat it as a level of consciousness, a layer of consciousness, and on that level of consciousness it has its own rules.

The Speakers are familiar with those rules, and often serve as guides.

He knows what the rules are on that unconscious level -- in other words, what kind of symbol he uses represents what meaning to the conscious you. When you enter the deep unconscious states of inner consciousness, when you first enter you are not familiar with the rules of that environment, just as you are not familiar with the rules of the three-dimensional world -- you do not know them. But these Speakers know them, so they often guide you there, telling you what to do when you enter that space. Just like many people who meditate or sit in stillness, after entering deeper states, they need someone to give them preliminary guidance: what you should do when you reach this level, how you should learn, improve, and progress, and how you should experiment with or practice abilities you once had.

Sometimes they work within organizations, working through temples, and become involved in power structures. Generally speaking, however, they are much more solitary lone rangers.

Within organizations, like within a religious organization or a social organization or a country. Just like in ancient Egypt, they worked within the very tightly organized religious system of the ancient Egyptian pharaohs. They not only worked within it, but also became involved in the ancient power structures. But generally speaking, these Speakers are lone rangers, though there are also those who work collectively within a group organization.

Because of the true simultaneity of time, through their various "manifestations" they speak to your generations simultaneously.

Because time is simultaneous -- past, present, and future all happen at once -- therefore when he teaches the dharma in one lifetime, it is equivalent to teaching the dharma across generations.

For example, occasionally they also act as intermediaries, introducing two different reincarnational incarnations of one personality to each other.

Occasionally -- he says occasionally, not often -- he will also introduce your different reincarnational personalities to each other. For example, in this life you are a male, and perhaps in one of your previous lives you were a female, and that female may have been a queen; perhaps in this life you are just an ordinary civil servant. He will sometimes introduce these two personalities to each other, saying that you were originally one and the same.

The laws within physical reality are such that objects are fixed and permanent, but in other realities the laws are often quite different.

This is certain; he has already said a lot about this earlier. Beyond this material world, things are neither fixed nor permanent.

There, the nature of mental activity will follow different routes, and the so-called continuity of time will not exist.

On that nonphysical level, the nature of mental activity must follow completely different methods and routes. Time is no longer continuous; it becomes chunks, segments, pieces -- it becomes that kind of psychological time, not continuous physical time.

But through the use of different psychological combinations, perceptual organization will exist.

Although in that nonphysical reality where time does not exist, there is no continuous time, our perceptual system still exists. This perceptual system, through different psychological organizations -- remember, different psychological organizations -- you can still perceive.

Even though you can perceive them, such systems, viewed from the outside, seem meaningless to you.

In other words, although in that nonphysical reality you can also perceive what happens -- for example, our dreaming is a nonphysical reality, or when you have an out-of-body experience it is also a nonphysical reality -- but viewed from outside that nonphysical reality, that is, viewed from physical reality, the things that happen in those nonphysical realities are all meaningless. He adds "seem" -- you see how extremely rigorous his language is, he adds "seem" -- actually they are not meaningless, they are meaningful, but they appear to be meaningless. All the things that happen in that nonphysical reality seem to have no meaning to our physical reality. So you will feel that dreams are meaningless, your intuition is meaningless, inspiration is meaningless, and going out of body and walking around is just walking around, with no meaning either. You do not know what it actually represents.

You will be unable to observe the axial points around which the action revolves.

You have not discovered that the actions of your material world revolve around the things in those nonphysical realities, with them as the axial points. Just as we have said many times before, your physical reality comes from there -- they are the axial points -- but you think they are meaningless, and you cannot perceive them.

Thus the very exact laws of those systems become extremely obscure to you.

Since you cannot recognize that the things happening in those nonphysical worlds are actually the axial points of the physical world, then you are even less able to understand that within those nonphysical systems there are certain exact laws. In those nonphysical realities, just as our physical reality has its own rules and laws -- those rules and laws become even more obscure to you, and you do not know where those laws are.

The Speakers are familiar with the laws of many systems.

Many of the systems referred to here mean that the physical system is only one of them, and there are also many nonphysical systems, and the nonphysical systems are not just one either, there are many.

However, broadly speaking, most of these systems are still related to your own reality.

Although these different nonphysical systems are as numerous as the hairs on an ox, too many to count, generally speaking, these nonphysical systems are still related to our physical system and to our kind of reality.

The inner universes are countless, and only the most advanced gestalt consciousness, developed to its utmost, can be aware of the whole.

The true nonphysical reality is far more vast than the physical reality we now see, by an unknowable amount. Every nonphysical reality has its own rules, its own laws, all different. These countless inner universes can only be known by those of the highest order, those who have reached the highest state of consciousness, the gestalt consciousness developed to its utmost, similar to what we call the Buddha's state of unsurpassed complete and perfect enlightenment. Only in that state can you understand all of them.

In relation to this whole, then, the Speakers must be called "local."

In relation to this whole of reality, including the physical and the nonphysical, these Speakers are only familiar with a portion of the nonphysical realities and the physical reality, not all of them. Most Speakers are "local."

There is something like a chart, showing many nearby systems of reality.

Just like a map of our human world, or like a human classification chart, it marks out which systems of reality are nearby, physical and nonphysical, just as we speak of what the underworld is like, what the world after death is like, what the systems of probabilities are like. It lists all the realities in its vicinity. It is like saying, suppose you are familiar with Beijing, then you are familiar with the places around Beijing, Tianjin, Hebei, Inner Mongolia, and so on. If you live in Guangzhou, then you are more familiar with the surroundings of Guangzhou, Dongguan, Shenzhen, Hong Kong, including the surrounding cities. But a person from Guangdong, if you have never been to Beijing, you are not familiar with the geography around Beijing. That is roughly the meaning.

I hope someday to be able to give this to you.

He hopes that one day he can give us this chart, the classification chart of how many realities there are. He later did some similar work. In Chapter 18 he will talk about how he divides consciousness into how many levels, letting you know that each level represents a reality, a world. He classified them.

To do so, Ruburt would have to be more highly trained.

Not yet. Ruburt still needs more training.

There are points of coincidence where, under certain conditions, it is possible to go from one such system into another.

These points of coincidence, points where time and space intersect, and under specific conditions, plus after Ruburt has undergone long-term intensified training, he can go from one reality space into another reality space.

These systems do not need to exist separately in what you call space, of course.

When you go from one system into another, it does not mean you have to go to another planet or outer space or to some particular place. They are not separate. They are all around us, right beside us.

These points are called points of intersection, where one camouflage system "merges into" another.

This returns to the content of Chapter 4 or Chapter 5, where the point of intersection was discussed. What is a point of intersection? It is those points where two different times and spaces overlap. There, one physical system "merges into" another. He used the word "merges," and this word is worth exploring. It is not overlap, it is "merging" into. In other words, by borrowing this point, this time and space can enter another time and space.

Some points of intersection have geographical locations within your system.

Some points of intersection have physical geographical locations in our three-dimensional world, such as a specific longitude and latitude, a particular geographical marker.

In all cases, however, the necessary beginning step for entering such a point is to adjust the "frequency."

In all cases, the most basic condition for wanting to enter a point of intersection is to adjust this "frequency." But here he does not explain what frequency it is. He put it in quotation marks. His frequency is not the frequency of waves or the frequency of energy that we can artificially understand. It is not that simple.

And this entry can only be accomplished in an out-of-body condition.

This is a very crucial point: if you want to go from one system into another system, it can only be done in an out-of-body condition. Only by adjusting the frequency in an out-of-body condition can you go from this space into another space. Therefore, trying to reach another space through the physical body is unrealistic. There is no such possibility.

Human beings have always been researching and inventing time machines and space-time machines, transmitting a person from here to there, from this portal to that portal. This is a fantasy of human beings based on the three-dimensional world. People too strongly believe in and are obsessed with the idea that this world is composed only of the three-dimensional world, so they always think that so-called time-space travel means transporting a person from one point in material form to another point in material form. Here Seth has already made it very clear that it is impossible. The only way you can ever enter another time and space is that you can only enter in an out-of-body state. Your spirit body, or your soul, can go over, but your physical body cannot.

Everyone in dreams has access to the information possessed by the Speakers, and the state of consciousness adjacent to normal consciousness that occurs in sleep patterns cannot be picked up by your EEG. The adjacent "corridor" through which your consciousness travels.

This EEG refers to the brainwave testing instrument. It has always existed. In the field of brain science research, there has always been this kind of instrument for measuring brainwaves, measuring the activity patterns of the brain.

He says that during your sleep, you can obtain the information of the Speakers. And in the process of obtaining this information, in that state of consciousness adjacent to your normal consciousness, the adjacent state to normal consciousness is the subconscious. Whether in the unconscious state of sleep or the subconscious state, your activities in this state cannot be picked up by the human EEG.

Therefore, that is an adjacent "corridor," a passageway beside consciousness. Our EEG can only explore the conscious, when we are awake or alert. Now people have developed to the point where they can convert brainwave commands in the waking state into operations, such as simulated flight. A few years ago there was an experiment where a person wore a brainwave device and imagined in his mind how to fly a plane and make it take off¹³, and then in a flight simulator he made the simulator operate the simulated plane to take off. Many such experiments have been done, and now it is very advanced. Therefore, the brainwave instrument can only capture your conscious brain activity. Subconscious and unconscious brain activity cannot be detected by human instruments.

The portion of consciousness that is dependent upon the body remains within the body.

That portion of consciousness that is dependent upon the body remains within our body.

Meanwhile, the higher intuitive centers are activated.

The intuitive centers are one level higher than that portion of consciousness dependent upon the body.

The "absent" portion of the self cannot be traced by brainwave patterns.

The "absent" portion refers to the subconscious and unconscious parts. You are composed of three parts: the unconscious, the subconscious, and the conscious. You can only perceive the conscious part. The "absent" portion cannot be traced. It is basically not a brain activity, so you cannot trace it.

Many people ask whether consciousness necessarily exists within the brain, whether the brain is where consciousness resides. No. Brain scientists have conducted a great many experiments, searching repeatedly, to find whether there is a part of the human brain responsible for human consciousness. They found none. Now brain science is extremely advanced. They can know which region of the brain is responsible for which part: one region is responsible for language, one region for abstract arithmetic, one region for reasoning and logic, one region for sensation, one region for smell, one region for movement. They have figured out every region. But the one thing they cannot figure out is that they cannot find any region in the brain that is responsible for your consciousness. In other words, the part that you think is you, the "I" that you think about all day in your head, "I want this," "I am hungry," that "I" has no corresponding region in the brain. The self-conscious part cannot be found there. This passage also illustrates this principle: your conscious mind, eating, sleeping, thinking, these things can be found and detected in the brain, but the true ontological, deep-level consciousness or subconsciousness cannot be found to exist anywhere in the brain. From physics, from brain science, from the material level, it cannot be found.

Regarding this, I think the most famous case occurred with a famous neuroscientist. This scientist is called Alexander III¹⁴, and he is probably still alive now. Once he had a serious accident. His brain was infected by a kind of bacteria. His entire brain was invaded and infected by the bacteria, and in an instant he entered a state similar to brain death. Although he still had a heartbeat and breathing, basically no activity could be measured in his brain. Because the human brain has many bacteria invading it, and humans have the blood-brain barrier mechanism, many drugs find it very difficult to enter the brain.

He spent an entire week, seven days, in this state. At that time he was admitted to the ICU for emergency treatment. After he finally woke up and recovered, he described those seven days, the seven days after there was no brain activity. He was conscious, very conscious.

What did he see? He saw himself arrive at a riverbank. By the river there were many of his former relatives and friends who had passed away, all waiting for him there. He walked out of a forest, walked out across a meadow. Past the meadow was a river, and across the river was a group of people waiting for him. When he approached, the people saw him and were very surprised: "Hey, why is it you who has come?" He said, "Aren't you waiting for me?" They said, "We are not waiting for you." He found this very strange. Then he was among that crowd, and at that moment there was a woman he did not know, a young woman, wearing a very beautiful white dress. She took his hand and said, "Come, I will take you around." She took him everywhere, walking around, taking him to see the forest, the meadow, experiencing everything, telling him some things. Then after going around once, she told him, "Actually, we are not waiting for you. You should not have come. You should go back. It is not yet your time to come." So he went back, and after going back he woke up.

I will not go into the details of the process in between. He experienced a great many things and wrote a book. This person himself was a pure materialist. He absolutely did not believe in ghosts or gods, did not believe in any soul. He was a very famous neuroscientist. His family had practiced medicine for generations. In medical circles, when you mention the surname Alexander, it is a very famous medical family passed down through generations, hence the name Alexander III. Such a purely materialist medical scientist, he absolutely did not believe in these things.

So after he woke up and recovered, being a doctor himself, he pulled out all his medical records from his illness, all the data, all the brain scans, all the recorded information from that time, and studied them himself. After studying them, he discovered something that made his hair stand on end. In his own words, it completely overturned all his values and worldview. Why? Because during those seven days, he had been monitoring his brain with a brainwave instrument the whole time, and he found that during those seven days his brain was exactly the same as normal brain death. There was not a single signal. The brainwave was completely blank, with no brain activity at all.

Then he was stunned, because he believed that consciousness should be in the human brain. He said, "Then even if I dreamed, that is also a kind of consciousness, and it should also be detectable by the brain. That is what he believed." Any psychological reaction or mental activity of a person should be reflected in the brain, all being the result of brain activity. That was his materialist view. But he found that during those seven days he had no brain activity, yet during those seven days many, many things happened, and he remembered them clearly. He did not know where this consciousness came from. That was the first thing that confused him.

The second thing was that a few days later he received a letter, and this letter made him even more devastated. The letter was written to him by his parents. He was actually the adopted son of Alexander II, not their biological child, but a child they adopted. After this adopted son was discharged from the hospital, his parents still treated him as their own child. To congratulate him on leaving the hospital, they sent him a letter containing a family photo, expressing that the whole family welcomed him out of the hospital and back to normal life. In the group photo in that letter, he saw the woman he had seen after brain death, after his near-death state. He had never known this person in his life, but he saw this woman in the photo. He asked his adoptive parents who this woman was, and they said, "This is your sister whom you have never met." Because of the adoptive father relationship, this girl had died when she was very young, so he had never met his deceased sister.

When he saw this letter, he was even more astonished. He found that the things he experienced after death, that girl taking him around everywhere, was not just some random passerby. She was someone related to him. And this person had actually existed in the real physical world, in real life, only he had never seen her. This layer of relationship completely overturned all his views on materialism and traditional medicine, the view that this world is composed entirely of matter, that human thoughts all come from the brain, that the brain determines everything. All his views were completely overturned.

After this event, besides working as a normal doctor, he traveled around giving lectures, spreading the word about what he had experienced. You can still find recordings of his own lectures on YouTube now. As a scientist, he speaks about these things from a scientific perspective. He wrote a book. I forget the name of the book. Because his fame in the medical field is extremely high, he is a very highly regarded brain surgeon in Western medicine, so his book caused a great uproar. Through his experience, humanity could truly realize that the original understanding of the brain, of consciousness and the soul, was completely wrong, fundamentally in the wrong direction.

This happened around the 2000s, I cannot remember the exact time. Seth was explaining this principle in February 1971. He said that the human brainwave instrument cannot trace those subconscious and unconscious activities. It can only trace the conscious mind related to the body. Did he not say it? Only that consciousness that is dependent upon the body can remain within the body, can remain within the human brain, can be detected by your instruments. But those activities beneath the subconscious and unconscious do not occur within the body, and even less within your brain, so your instruments cannot detect them.

The point of its departure and return may show a particular pattern.

"It" refers to consciousness. As he just said, consciousness is divided into several parts. One part is the part associated with the body, which remains within the body. Within consciousness there is a higher intuitive center. The point where this soul departs and returns, the state of departure and return, can be captured by your brainwave instrument. At the moment of departure and the moment of return, the brainwave instrument will show some changes. But after it leaves, what it does, you have no idea at all.

The out-of-body experience itself cannot be detected in any way.

The line drawn by your brainwave instrument only shows any characteristic pattern displayed at the moment before departure. At the instant your soul leaves the body, at that point in time, the brainwave instrument on the physical body will show a special symbol or a characteristic feature. You can only see that point. After that, you know nothing.

Actually, as mysterious as this sounds, it happens every night during sleep, every day.

It involves two areas of activity.

From here on, including the next session, the content about the levels of consciousness is very deep. He tells you whether consciousness has many levels, all approached through sleep. In other words, if a person wants to study consciousness or sleep, these two sessions can be read repeatedly. They are of great help to all who study sleep.

One is a very passive area, and one is extremely active.

In a certain state, this part of consciousness enters a passive state. What does it do in the passive state? It receives information. And in the next stage, when it participates through action, remember, it is through action, not just receiving information. This consciousness begins to participate in action. It is active. At that time, through participation and actual examples, it very vividly perceives the concepts given to it.

The first kind is passively receiving information. Whatever you give it, it accepts. The second kind is actively obtaining information through action, just like us humans, perceiving the concepts given to it through action. It is not accepting the concept, it is perceiving the concept.

This is the most protected, most secret area of sleep.

In the entire process of sleep, this actively participating area is the most secret area. You absolutely cannot detect it.

It also has restorative qualities here.

Only by entering this area can it restore your vitality to the greatest extent. Once you enter this area, your body enters a very rapid state of recovery.

And it is in this stage that the Speakers act as teachers and guides.

Where do the Speakers work? They work in this stage, in the deepest, most secret, most protected area of consciousness in your sleep, in the actively participating area.

This information, however, upon return, is often interpreted by other levels of the self, such as the body consciousness and the subconscious, and then turned into dreams that are meaningful to these areas of the self.

All the activities you participated in, all the perceptions you obtained, all the experiences and concepts you obtained in that area, upon return, must be interpreted by your body consciousness or subconscious, and then turned into a dream. Only then does the dream arise.

General instruction, for example, may be translated or designed into practical advice concerning a particular event.

For example, in that underlying area, it teaches you some core knowledge, comprehensive knowledge, without any special cases. But when it reaches your body level and subconscious level, when it is translated and interpreted, it is transformed into practical advice that may involve a particular event, a particular matter, such as whether this matter should be done or not, what you should do, what choice you should make, and so on.

There are several very definite stages of sleep, and they all provide various services to the personality.

Now research divides sleep into many stages. The different stages of sleep serve different purposes for your personality.

They are these different stages, and the different stages of sleep also represent different levels of conscious comprehension and activity. There are some physical changes that accompany them, and some changes are related to age.

Let us continue reading. In the next chapter I will discuss these in detail, so I will not talk about them now. For the present, you only need to realize what?

There are certain steps and definite alterations that occur as consciousness shifts from exterior reality to interior reality.

In other words, to put it simply, from the state when you are awake to the state when you are asleep, there are certain steps and definite alterations. These are the different stages of your sleep.

And these alterations are not purposeless. It is enough that you know that consciousness follows a very predictable path as it leaves and reaches its many destinations.

What does this passage mean? He says you only need to understand that when you shift the focus of consciousness from the external dazzling world, whether through meditation, sitting, sleep, or out-of-body experience, to an inward direction, when you focus your attention inward, at that time your consciousness undergoes a series of changes, and this series of changes follows certain laws, just as your sleep is composed of many stages, step by step. You only need to know this. As for how many levels your consciousness is actually divided into, he says we will discuss that in the next chapter. In this chapter we will not talk about it for now. It has a certain purpose, and there is a certain path when reaching the destination.

Through the ages, the Speakers have been teaching dreamers how to behave within these other environments, and also teaching them how to bring back information that would be beneficial to their present personalities.

Through the ages there have always been Speakers teaching these people, teaching them in dreams how to go into the deeper levels of consciousness, and also teaching them how to bring back information that is beneficial to their present personality, this reincarnated personality.

An individual may have varying degrees of awareness of these journeys, according to his intent, his current goals, and his development.

According to his own current state, current intent, goals, and development, that is, the different levels of his own consciousness, his degree of awareness of these journeys is also different.

Some, for example, recall very clearly, but often misinterpret their experiences because of conscious concepts.

He thinks very clearly, and he remembers very clearly, but because you have returned to the conscious state, those concepts about the unconscious and subconscious states become misinterpreted, and they misunderstand the experiences they obtained in between. The help to your three-dimensional conscious self is then not as great.

It is quite possible for a Speaker to help another dreamer while dreaming, when that person is having difficulties within an inner reality of the dream state.

He helps another dreaming person in the dream, because that person has some difficulties within that inner reality of the dream.

The concept of the guardian angel is, of course, highly connected with this.

We often speak of the concept of guardian spirits, guardian angels. Actually, it is these Speakers helping him in dreams, and you think it is like that.

A good Speaker is as effective in one reality as in another.

A Speaker can help people equally in the physical world and in the nonphysical world. In the three-dimensional world he can reason with you, explain things clearly to you, so that your consciousness rises and improves, constantly comprehending. In the nonphysical reality, in dreams, he will likewise very effectively persuade that you in the dream.

He can create psychic frameworks in physical reality, just as he does in the inner environment.

In physical reality, through explaining principles to you, he creates a psychic framework, just as he does in the nonphysical reality. He can create psychic frameworks in both aspects, and can help you in both.

Many artists, poets, and musicians are Speakers.

Why? Because they energetically transform one world, their inner thoughts, emotions, feelings, or something inner, into another world, into a song, a painting, a work, or a work of art in real life, or a movie, a television drama. He is actually taking something inner, calling it a world, and turning it into a work of art in the physical world that we can see.

They form psychic frameworks that exist between the two worlds.

This work of art spans two worlds, spanning both the inner world and the outer world. It is both a display of the inner, and a manifestation of the inner display in the three-dimensional world.

And this structure can be perceived by more than one reality at the same instant.

It simultaneously spans two realities, both in the nonphysical and in the physical.

Later he gives some personal advice for Ruburt: Ruburt should pay more attention to what he eats. Not eating just to fill his stomach, but eating with enthusiasm, with a passion for life. Many Westerners treat eating as just filling the stomach -- from childhood they are taught that people need carbohydrates, protein, fiber, and then they find that a hamburger contains all these things, and so does pizza. He treats eating as a purely physical act: a person needs energy, so matter is converted into energy. Seth tells Ruburt, you cannot eat just for the sake of eating; you should eat with a passion for life, with a certain love, with relish. We Chinese do this very well -- Chinese people never treat eating simply as eating; we treat eating as a very good life experience and life journey, an important part of life. In the process of eating we pay attention to color, aroma, and taste, and even add various cultural and ethnic meanings to it.

This session mainly talks about how Speakers help people in the invisible world and the visible world, and through this tells you: human consciousness has many levels, and some of these levels cannot yet be detected by our current human instruments.

Session 570

From Session 570 onward: The various levels of consciousness

In waking life as well, there are also different states of consciousness.

In the previous session he talked about how when the "Speakers" speak, very often they speak to us in dreams; and in dreams he further divided dreams into many levels. He said that dreams are you making an alteration of consciousness, the process of moving from a waking state into an unconscious state, and it is divided into many stages of consciousness, like a clear path.

Then here he says that when you are awake, in waking life there are also different states of consciousness. You do not focus your attention on these states of consciousness, and usually you are quite unaware of them -- we often do not pay attention to these changes in the states of our consciousness.

Each state of consciousness is aware of its own conditions.

This you must understand: each state of consciousness, the consciousness within that state, is aware of its own conditions.

And each is familiar with a different kind of reality.

In different states of consciousness, the consciousness in that state is familiar with the reality of that state, with its own condition within that reality, and it is also familiar with that reality.

You presently have a consciousness that concentrates upon one thing at a time.

He says that we in the present, waking state, basically can "concentrate on only one" focal point at a time, on one level of consciousness.

You have shut these other stages of consciousness out of your experience.

Consciousness also has other levels, other stages, and you have shut them out of your experience; you think they do not exist. But the whole of your entity, the other portions of you, are very intimately involved in those stages. For example, your inner self, your subconscious, will very intimately go deep into those stages of consciousness that you are not familiar with.

These other stages of consciousness create their own realities.

In different stages of consciousness, in different levels of consciousness, there are their own different realities -- just as we now create our own three-dimensional reality.

Reality, therefore, is a by-product of consciousness itself.

He tells you that the so-called reality we see, the so-called environment, is a by-product of consciousness itself, just as our three-dimensional world is also created by our consciousness.

If you could become aware of these realities, you might think of them as other places on earth, rather than as realms or locations in which completely different kinds of activity take place.

If you could perceive these realities on different levels, you would probably regard those different levels of consciousness, or those places in different dimensions of time and space, as other places in the human world. For example, when you dream, you dream of going somewhere -- some people say they dreamed of going to a certain city, a certain scenic spot, or a place they were not very familiar with -- and you assume by default that it is a place in the human world, rather than a completely different place of activity, a realm, not a place you are entirely unfamiliar with, completely unlike the earth.

If you probed these areas deeply, you would be forced to perceive them in terms of the root assumptions of your own reality system. For example, translating feelings of warmth and comfort into the image of a warm shelter, or a house.

You would use these basic conditions, these root assumptions of our human world to perceive them: translating feelings of warmth and comfort, in dreams or in those other levels of consciousness, into the image of a house or a shelter; and translating fear into the image of a demon. This is us using the root assumptions of the three-dimensional world to perceive things from other realities.

Occasionally even in waking life, a personality may automatically and spontaneously shift gears, and suddenly find itself for a second or a few minutes within another such area, and a sense of disorientation usually occurs.

This is very interesting. We often have a kind of trance state, suddenly a moment of trance, as if you are not here, and you do not know where you are; the surrounding environment suddenly becomes separated from you, replaced by a new environment. Some people have this state unintentionally, when they are in a daze or when their mind wanders; some people, through training, can do this quite deliberately.

But often they do not realize that they are interpreting their experience through their own consciousness and values.

After switching into another time and space, they use the consciousness of their "old home" -- that is, their entity consciousness, which is the consciousness they have in the three-dimensional world -- to interpret and explain the experiences in that other time and space.

All of this is not as mysterious as it may seem.

Almost everyone has had strange experiences of consciousness. In our QQ group, in the LINE group, everyone is sharing their own peculiar experiences. Someone has a moment of trance and enters another place, getting farther and farther away from the present three-dimensional world. Everyone has similar experiences, but they do not take them very seriously; yet their intuition can sense that they have a greater experience, not limited only to our three-dimensional world or the physical world.

Most dreams are like living picture postcards brought back from a journey that you have largely forgotten.

He says that most of your dreams are like going abroad or traveling somewhere and coming back, but because the journey was too long ago, you may have forgotten it; but you brought back some postcards, and by looking at these postcards, you can recall some things. But these events are not connected to one another -- seeing this photo can remind you of what happened at that time, seeing that photo can remind you of what happened at that location; but how you got from this place to that place in between, because of the passage of time, gradually becomes blurred. When you see these postcards, you will recall some of the things that happened at the scenic spot, at the location shown on the postcard.

Your consciousness has again oriented itself within physical reality.

Our consciousness went traveling for a while, and then returned to physical reality. Physical reality seems to be the "old home" of consciousness.

And the dream is an attempt to translate the deeper experience into a recognizable form.

This is very simple: the dream is an attempt to turn deeper experience into a form that you can recognize.

The dream images are also highly coded.

These images are all coded; you do not know what deeper meaning this image represents, what signal of an event hidden beneath the dream it is. This event is basically impossible to decode, because it has already been translated. This process of translation differs from person to person -- according to his own experiences, the things he has gone through, his emotions, including his values and belief systems, he transfers it over through his own conscious manner, and this transfer carries his own individualized elements. If you want to reverse it and find the original meaning at that time, he says it is basically impossible to decode.

So many people say "come interpret a dream for me" or "so-and-so will interpret your dream," and basically this has no real meaning. The process of dream interpretation is only meaningful to the person involved; to other people it has no meaning, because they do not know what exactly it represents behind the scenes for you. Although since ancient times many people have interpreted dreams, including Jung, who also interpreted dreams¹⁵, and others who also interpreted dreams, here he can only use many methods of psychoanalysis or statistical regularity -- he has summarized many, many dreams, and it cannot be a single dream alone. If you recorded and summarized more than a thousand dreams of one person, and a professional analyzed them, some patterns might be discovered; but if it is a single dream, other people really do not know what it represents.

This "Speaker," what does he do, as mentioned in the previous two sessions? He also helps you construct dreams. The "Speaker" will build a psychological structure, a psychological framework on your unconscious level, which is like helping you build a framework for a dream. Then he meets with you in that dream -- in there he may be another image, or an illusion of yours -- and in that state he transmits knowledge to you, using symbolic means, symbolic methods.

They can indeed be considered a kind of multidimensional art product. For a dream that exists in more than one reality, its effects cut across the various stages of consciousness, and in your terms, those stages are true for both the living and the dead, and in them both the living and the dead can participate, and it is for this reason that inspiration and revelation are so much a part of dreams.

He said this whole passage in one breath: that is to say, the "Speaker" helps you construct such a dream at the bottom layer of your unconscious, and it is equivalent to a very good, complete work of art, a multidimensional work of art, a multi-dimensional work of art. Because this dream does not exist in only one reality; this dream exists across realities. In other words, in this dream, you can not only make contact with your "Speaker," but also with your deceased, your relatives, or other people.

We know that the deceased are in another time and space, in that intermediate zone, that transitional zone, where they are in the process of choosing, of thinking, of reflecting. In that zone, they will often return to dreams -- they go back from that stage. So from that reality space, they can be connected with the space of your dreams. That is to say, the dream, you can imagine it as a portal connecting multiple dimensional spaces: it can go here, and it can go there, like a dock, like an airport transfer station, like a terminal, it can go to all kinds of places. So it is here that you can obtain inspiration and revelation -- because it is an information exchange station, it can go to all kinds of reality spaces, all kinds of dimensions, all kinds of time and space.

When your beliefs are not focused upon the physical world, you can more easily hear the "Speakers," translate their teachings, practice creating images, and be taught methods of maintaining physical health.

Only when you are not focused on physical reality can you establish a deeper communication with the "Speakers." So since ancient times many practitioners have sat in meditation, have meditated -- what is the reason? It is to withdraw the focus from the physical world and turn it inward, toward a nonphysical world. Only in this way can you translate their teachings, practice using your beliefs to create images, and also be taught how to maintain the health of the body, the health of the flesh.

In the most secret and most protected area of sleep, the apparent barriers between the many levels of reality disappear.

This is the deepest, most protected place of sleep mentioned in the previous session, which is in that unconscious area. At that level, there are barriers between realities -- for example, the space where the deceased go, and the space where we humans are in the human world, and the spaces of beings in other dimensions, these realities are actually different time-spaces. But in the state at the deepest bottom layer of sleep, they do not have so many barriers; they can freely move through them, can come and go freely among the various time-spaces.

You then choose which probable actions you want to actualize within your system.

Because there are no longer those limitations of time and space, and the barriers between realities are also gone, you can become aware of some other or probable realities. At this time you can choose which of those probable realities you want to actualize in your physical reality.

In the dream state you follow through on other probable actions, to observe their results.

In dreams, you can carry out your possible actions or a result you have imagined -- you do not know what result this projection will have, so you can let it actualize in the dream, and then see what the result is, and at that point you can decide whether to choose it or not.

You can do this individually. And you can also do it collectively, on a national or global level.

He says that not only can you do this alone, you can also do it in groups in dreams. This is equivalent to saying that we do a group consciousness projection. This is a very valuable thing -- if we use it well, we can collectively project in dreams, for example, the results of this pandemic, several possible outcomes, which one is best for us, and we can do some projections.

Consciousness perceives different events at different levels and stages.

Consciousness at different levels -- different times, or different dimensions, different time-spaces -- and stages, perceives different kinds of events; the categories of events are all different.

To perceive these events, you need only learn to shift the focus of your attention from one level to another.

His meaning is that what each level perceives, the events it perceives, are of completely different kinds; they involve different depths and breadths and categories. If you want to understand these events, you adjust your focus to that level. In other words, if you want to know all the past lives of this person, you can adjust your focus here; if you want to know the evolutionary process of the whole human race, you can adjust your focus there; if you want to know the progress of the entire earth, you can adjust your focus there. His meaning is that different levels of consciousness correspond to different events -- whatever kind of events you want to understand, you aim your conscious focus at that level. He says it is very simple; you only need to shift your focus.

There are subtle chemical and electromagnetic changes that accompany these different stages of consciousness. And there are also actual changes in the physical body itself, in the production of hormones and in the activity of the pineal gland.

Here he states two facts: when your consciousness shifts between different levels, that is to say, when the focus of consciousness shifts between different levels -- for example, when you move from the physical world to the nonphysical world, from level one to level two, and then to level three -- what happens at this time? There will be subtle chemical or electromagnetic changes, and in your physical body there will also be actual changes in hormones or in the activity of the pineal gland. He states such a fact here.

Usually you slide from the waking state into sleep without being aware of the various conditions of consciousness through which you pass.

Generally we go directly from waking into sleep, and you do not even know how you fell asleep -- no one knows how they fell asleep. Because your consciousness has already begun to shift, from the waking state to a transitional stage, and finally to an unconscious stage. In that process, because what you are about to enter is an unconscious stage, you cannot remember how you fell asleep in between. It seems very simple, but actually your consciousness has already gone from a waking consciousness, to a transitional consciousness, to a final completely unconscious state, or to other levels of consciousness beneath the bottom layer of the unconscious; you have to pass through many different levels and conditions of consciousness. The process from waking to falling asleep has several stages.

With varying degrees of spontaneity, consciousness turns inward, away from matter, away from the worries and concerns of the moment.

When you turn inward, you leave behind the worries and concerns brought by this physical world.

There is an undifferentiated area between wakefulness and sleep.

That is, there is a transitional interface, a transitional level. There, you become a passive, open receiver. In the previous session he said that when you sleep there are two states: one state is being a passive receiver of information, your consciousness is a passive receiver of information; the other state, your consciousness is a very active participant, participating in events, in actions, to feel them. What he is talking about now is the first stage -- in this transitional stage between sleep and waking, your consciousness is the receiver, it is passively receiving.

At this point, you can easily receive telepathic and clairvoyant information.

So many people, when doing lucid dreaming, it is in the morning just after waking up, going to the bathroom, coming back to lie down, and about to go back to sleep, in that process of being half asleep and half awake -- about to fall asleep but not yet fully asleep -- this is the transitional stage. Many people at this time will have some lucid dreams, or will have some telepathic experiences, some images, some pictures will appear, some inspiration, perception, intuitive things, sixth-sense things will all come out. He tells you that because at that time your consciousness is in a receiving stage, like an antenna it is especially sensitive, and it is easy to receive telepathy and clairvoyance. So many people dream of a family member passing away, a relative having an accident, and things like that, generally they can feel these things in this state.

Your consciousness may seem to float, with various physical sensations, sometimes of expansion, sometimes of falling.

In this state, your consciousness is floating. There are two or several other sensations: some people feel their body swelling, becoming larger, and some people feel their body falling, like falling off a cliff.

These sensations are characteristic of certain "moments," moments in which you almost catch hold of yourself, almost become somewhat aware of this undifferentiated area.

The sensation of expansion is a physical interpretation of the expansion of the psyche -- when you feel your body swelling, it actually means your psyche is expanding, a physical interpretation of the expansion of the psyche. And the sensation of falling is generally an interpretation of consciousness suddenly returning to the body -- you feel as if you suddenly dropped, but actually it is consciousness suddenly returning to the body.

This period can only last a few minutes, half an hour, not too long -- this half-awake, half-asleep state. Or you can go back again, that is, you can become awake again, just wake up. It is a buffering, supportive, and expansive stage of consciousness.

Suggestions given at this time are highly effective.

Remember this! Suggestions given at this stage are all highly effective.

After this period, an active state of false dreaming is bound to occur.

Why does it make false dreams? He will explain. In these false dreams, the mind -- that is, the conscious part of your brain that has not yet completely stopped working, that part of the brain consciousness -- is still busy processing the worldly concerns that have been held onto through the first two stages.

That is, some things from the daytime, or things you often feel anxious about, things you worry about, things you are concerned about, are still being held onto by you at this time, caught by your waking consciousness and brought into this state, and then they become a dream of yours. And this dream, he tells you, is a false dream -- because it is a continuation in the dream of some things from your daytime, not a real dream. What he calls a real dream is the process in which your consciousness has detached from the three-dimensional world and entered a higher dimension or another dimension; whereas this dream, which still uses the perspective of the three-dimensional world to consider the things you were anxious about during the day, he calls a false dream.

If these false dreams are too intense, you may wake up.

Sometimes you wake up in fright, or wake up from anxiety.

This is a vivid, fiery, but very brief stage.

Then, after this stage passes:

Another undifferentiated level follows.

What is an undifferentiated level? It means you cannot feel its arrival; that is what is called an undifferentiated level.

As consciousness becomes more firmly aligned with other levels, sounds, conversations, or images may appear.

When your consciousness is still fixed on a certain level, communicating with it, at this time there will be clear sounds, conversations, and images appearing. Perhaps several of these images are competing for this person's attention, competing for your point of focus.

At this point, the body is quite quiet.

After this very brief fiery interval, there will be a period when consciousness is relatively concentrated, fixed on a certain level, when the focus of consciousness is relatively stable, and by this time your body is quite quiet.

This whole process is describing the levels and stages of human sleep and dreaming. This material is actually very suitable for scientists who specialize in dream research to study.

The individual will follow one of these inner stimuli into deeper levels of consciousness, and form the information he receives into some light dreams.

After the fiery period, there will be a less differentiated stage. In this less differentiated stage, when your consciousness happens to be focused on a certain level, when the focus is relatively fixed, there will be some clear sounds, conversations, or images appearing, all of which are meant to attract your attention. See which one you are more interested in; if you are more interested in one of them, you follow that one focus and enter into a deeper level of consciousness, and then form the information he receives into some light dreams.

During this time, at a certain point, he will enter a deeply protected area of sleep. There, he is at the threshold of other levels of reality or probabilities.

That is, in this process, at a certain time he will deeply enter a protected area. At that position, he has already arrived at the threshold of other realities, of probabilities -- he has entered a doorway leading to different realities. Only at this point does he truly begin to be able to enter other realities; before that it was still just a transition.

At this point, his experience will be beyond the scope of time as you know it.

At this point, at the threshold where he enters other probable realities, he says he transcends the scope of your time. So although only a few minutes pass, he experiences several years.

Although only a few minutes pass, he experiences several years.

After living through these several years -- in the dream he lived through several years -- then he will return toward the human world, to a sleep zone that your scientists call the rapid eye movement period, called REM, Rapid Eye Movement¹⁶. This rapid eye movement period is a process that scientists have now discovered. That is, after you enter that other reality space, that point in time transcends the limitations of human time or physical time -- in there there is no concept of our time; it is possible that in there a few minutes and you live a whole lifetime. He gives a rough figure here: a few minutes is equivalent to several years. This is also the feeling of the "yellow millet dream" -- in the time it takes for yellow millet rice to cook, you have already experienced an entire lifetime.

Then from there he returns, returning toward the human world, back to our three-dimensional physical world, and in the process of returning, his consciousness has already come back from that other time and space. In the process of coming back, it enters what we can call this rapid eye movement period -- the stage where the eyeballs move rapidly and dreams are heavily produced, which scientists have long proven.

It uses the knowledge it has gained to create human-oriented dreams there.

In this rapid eye movement period it is making dreams. This dream is manufactured; it is not the immediate feedback of what you experienced. Because the things in that time and space, in that phase, your conscious brain cannot keep up with their development -- your brain cannot experience something that takes several years within a few minutes; you can only experience fragmentary processes of those several years. So after it has finished experiencing that event, it comes to this process to make dreams, creating a dream that is oriented to the human world -- something the human world can understand, as if it happened in another place in the human world. So this is a process of dream-making. In the rapid eye movement period it is making dreams; your brain and eyes are constantly moving, and actually your brain is constantly making dreams. Where does the information for making dreams come from? It comes from the knowledge it obtained from other reality spaces, and the dream is made from that.

This cycle will repeat itself.

The rapid eye movement period generally occurs two to three times or four to five times, not necessarily; everyone's sleep is different, so it will repeat. Scientists who study sleep have already understood human sleep very clearly, but the underlying matters are still unknown to humanity; they do not know what a person actually experiences after falling asleep.

But in waking life as well, almost the same fluctuations and stages occur.

He says do not think that only when you are sleeping do you have such consciousness, do you enter deeper levels of things, does such a process occur. When you are awake, the same fluctuations and stages also occur.

Though you are even more unaware of them.

In dreams something will still be left behind for you, a dream, but when you are awake nothing is left behind at all; it just goes in, and you simply do not know about it.

Because the ego self is very careful to cover over these other areas of experience.

When you are awake, your ego automatically wipes away and covers over these experiences on the nonphysical levels, and you simply do not know.

Yet beneath waking consciousness, precise stages also exist, with the same chemical, electromagnetic, and hormonal fluctuations.

While you are awake, beneath your conscious perception, there are still very faint chemical, electromagnetic, and hormonal fluctuations. These fluctuations just now signify that your consciousness is actually entering different levels at different times -- a symbol of entering different levels. You have no awareness at all of what your consciousness is doing; you have no awareness at all of what your consciousness, or even your subconscious and unconscious, are doing.

You yourself cannot even track it for five minutes.

He says you can try tracking your own consciousness, watching what it is doing, and he says you cannot even manage five minutes; you simply cannot keep up with it.

Only those with enough determination to spend effort on this, to travel through and experience their own subjective realms, can sense the vastness of consciousness's dimensions.

Only those who truly spend effort and time focusing their attention within their subjective experience can sense the breadth and dimensionality of consciousness's levels.

Intuitively, however, everyone knows that some part of his experience always escapes him.

Intuitively you know that some of your experience escapes your consciousness; you can feel it intuitively.

When you suddenly cannot recall a name you should know, in essence you have a feeling that on a subconscious level you are always aware of it.

He gives an example: when we are talking, we often bring up a certain person, or a very familiar movie actor, or a very familiar plot point, or that person's name, yet you just cannot recall it. The name is right on the tip of your tongue, but you cannot say it. It is that feeling -- you discover there are places in your consciousness you cannot reach, places that escape the range of your conscious awareness. You definitely know that name, you know it one hundred percent, but at that moment it escapes the range of your consciousness, and you cannot grasp it. This is not a matter of memory, and it has nothing to do with poor recall; it is simply that at that particular time, your consciousness is on a certain level that escapes your range -- it is simply not on this level.

His purpose is to help you understand this multidimensional existence and to relate to it -- not only to know that it exists, but also to relate to it -- and to bring it as much as possible into the level of your conscious attention. Those dimensional existences that escape your attention -- he wants you to bring them into the level you can perceive. The main work of the "Speakers" is precisely this.

Only by feeling, sensing, or intuitively perceiving the depth of your own experience can you glimpse even a little of the nature of All That Is.

He says you can only perceive the depth and even the breadth of your experience through feeling, sensing, and intuition. Only through this approach can you come to understand a little of the vastness of All That Is's nature -- its multilayered, multidimensional, multi-spacetime simultaneous attributes.

When you become more aware of how consciousness operates in daily life, you can learn to observe it.

When, through what he just introduced to you -- how in dreams your consciousness divides into several levels doing different things, and how while awake your consciousness also does certain things without your knowing -- it is as if the veil of consciousness has been lifted. When in your daily life you consciously observe how your consciousness operates, you can learn to observe your consciousness.

See how it acts in these other less familiar regions.

What are the regions you are familiar with? Your physical world -- your consciousness is very familiar with this physical reality. In other realities, you are unfamiliar, relatively unfamiliar. When you learn to observe how consciousness operates and works, you will be able to apply your consciousness in those regions you are less familiar with -- in other words, to tune the focus of your consciousness onto the things you are interested in. Occasionally in our daily lives, we do not need to spend time and energy adjusting the focus of our consciousness; automatically and naturally, the moment the mind thinks of something, the focus of consciousness is right there -- but this is limited to our three-dimensional world.

Probable realities are only probable to you because you cannot perceive them.

Here he makes a play on words: probable realities may indeed exist, but to you they really are only probable realities, because you cannot perceive their actual existence; they remain only a possibility.

Consciousness Is a Tool Available to You

Let's continue with what he says next.

These stages of consciousness are all part of your own reality.

We just said that consciousness has different levels -- conscious, subconscious, unconscious, and many other levels. These stages and levels are all part of your reality. Don't think that only the surface, shallowly manifested consciousness is yourself; all of those are part of you.

Your knowledge of them is of great practical value.

Your knowledge of that part of consciousness you don't know is of great value to you.

You can learn to "shift gears," to stand apart from your own experience and examine it from a much clearer viewpoint.

"Shifting gears" means shifting the focus of consciousness, from the physical world to the nonphysical world, from this level to another level; it also means stepping back from your own present first-person perspective and turning it into a third-person perspective on yourself.

We people nowadays are hiding behind consciousness. We use consciousness, but actually consciousness and we are separate, yet we think consciousness is us and we are consciousness. We don't think of consciousness as a tool -- we don't think of consciousness as being like a pair of glasses, where today we can switch to reading glasses, tomorrow to nearsighted glasses, today to a wide-angle lens, tomorrow to a telescope. We don't think that way; we think consciousness is us. We don't know that consciousness is a tool, something that can be picked up and used by us, because we use it every day so familiarly that we take it to be ourselves.

In other words, if a person has worn glasses since childhood and is used to them, they can't do without those glasses; they feel the glasses are part of their eyes, and without the glasses they can't see anything clearly. You depend on your present consciousness, and your dependence on this consciousness is excessive, so you equate this consciousness with a part of yourself, just like a person with severe nearsightedness equates their glasses with a part of their body.

So what does he train you to do? He trains you to step back from another angle and create some distance, not to stand together with consciousness, not to hide behind it, but to observe from a third-person perspective how this consciousness works, how it operates, and what its relationship to you is. You are the observer who observes; consciousness is your tool. It is like a searchlight -- wherever the light shines, that place becomes bright and can be seen clearly, and where it doesn't shine is dark and invisible. Or you could imagine it as the precise focus of a camera: wherever your focus is set is very clear, and where the focus is not set is all blurry. Anyone who has taken photographs knows that if you want to see distant views or close views, if you want to shoot something, you need to change different lenses to get different image effects; it's the same principle. Your consciousness is just such a tool, and you need to learn to use it. This consciousness is not you -- you must understand that consciousness is not you; it is a tool you can pick up and use.

Solving Problems in Sleep

You can prepare problems or difficult questions, and give yourself the suggestion that they will be solved in your sleep state.

You can prepare some difficulties and problems that you encounter in the three-dimensional world, in real life, things you cannot solve, and bring them into sleep to solve them. You give yourself a suggestion: I am going to go inside and solve this problem.

You can also suggest that you will converse with distant friends, or convey important information that you perhaps cannot convey in words.

When he says "converse," he does not mean a telephone conversation; a telephone conversation belongs to the three-dimensional world. He means conversing with distant friends at a deep level of consciousness, or conveying important information that you perhaps cannot convey in words. What does this mean? You can reach reconciliation on another level of reality, in a different reality, even though you cannot do it in this reality.

For example, if your relationship with your parents is not good, say your relationship with your mother is not good, and your mother passed away early. After all these years, through study and through your own continuous reflection, you discover that you misunderstood your mother, and that in fact you also bear a great deal of responsibility for the poor relationship you had with her all those years. But by now she has passed away, and in this world you cannot reach reconciliation with her. He says that in this state, you can go to a deep level of consciousness and reach reconciliation with her there, and reaching reconciliation at that level is just as effective.

You can direct the healing of your physical body.

You must learn to control your levels of consciousness, to control the focus of your consciousness. That is what he is talking about throughout. When you learn to control the focus of your consciousness, you can do the things just mentioned, and you can also direct the healing of your physical body. This is something many people care about: so if I do this, I can also heal myself, right?

Tell yourself that on a specific level of sleep consciousness, you can accomplish this.

When you sleep, tell yourself: on a certain level of sleep, you can heal yourself.

You can also ask a "Speaker" for help, asking him to give you whatever psychological guidance is necessary for maintaining your health.

Remember, it is psychological guidance. When you cannot do it, or cannot do it well, you can make a request to your "Speaker": my body is in such poor condition right now, I am facing this kind of illness, how do I resolve it? What psychological problems have I developed? Please help me resolve them. At that point, on a certain level of your consciousness, your "Speaker" will give you some symbolic suggestions, or some instructions, practical instructions, not necessarily.

If you have specific conscious goals, and you are fairly certain they are beneficial, you can suggest that they happen in dreams.

If you have a definite, clear goal, you can let it happen in a dream.

Because the dream itself will help bring about their realization in the physical world.

As for why it helps bring it about, and how it happens, we do not need to concern ourselves with that for now. What he tells you is this: you must be fairly certain that the matter is beneficial to you, that you are sure it is truly helpful; if you are not sure whether the matter is good or bad, then do not do it. But if you are sure it is truly helpful to you, truly beneficial, then you can suggest that it happen in a dream. Things that happen in dreams very easily happen in reality; the common saying "sweet dreams come true" means exactly this. Many people who have experience in this area find that some things that happen in dreams later happen in real life with vivid clarity.

You do many of these things unconsciously.

This may sound very magical, very mysterious, but in fact you have been doing it unconsciously all along; you have done many things of this kind.

You often travel back into the past and "relive" a particular event, so that it has a different ending, or so that you say the words you wish you had said.

You often have this feeling: in dreams, or somewhere in your mind, you often travel back into a particular past event, wanting a different ending. For example, in that place you want to say something that you wanted to say at the time but could not get out, and this time you say it. He says these are all things you often do unconsciously.

One stage of consciousness can be of help to you in other stages.

Different stages of consciousness, different levels, do not function only at that level. Things that happen at one level are also helpful to things at other levels, because all of it is part of you.

Light Trance and Dream Symbols

In a light trance state, if you ask, you will get the meaning of dream symbols.

Here he gives another technique. Your dreams are all translated over; you do not know what these translated images, figures, and events represent. He says that when you are in a light trance state—not a deep trance, but a slight trance state—you ask this consciousness, ask yourself: What does this actually represent? What does this image mean? What does this person represent? What does this event mean? He says you will get it. This is a technique; write it down. But it has to be done in a light trance; it will not work if you ask yourself in your waking state; you must be in a trance state, a light trance state, and then when you ask, it will come.

Then you can use these symbols to do things and as your personal self-suggestions.

What help is it after you ask? You can make a self-suggestion. For example: if you discover in a dream that a fountain represents the restoration of vitality. You dreamed of a fountain but did not know what the fountain meant; then in a light trance state you ask yourself: What does this fountain represent? Then it will give you a psychological suggestion telling you: this fountain actually represents your vitality being continuously restored. That fountain is like the restoration of vitality. Is this not a bit like in games, where many springs and fountains are things that restore your life force or magic power? So when you lack vitality or have insufficient energy, you can think of a fountain. This is very interesting. Of course, on another time-phase level, when you think of this fountain, will a fountain not appear in another space-time? You will create a fountain, and this fountain will bring you tangible vitality. So you need to learn to use these symbols, and how to use them.

In the most protected region of sleep, you are dealing with pure emotional and intellectual experience, separated from words and images.

In that most protected level of your sleep—that is, when you enter into other realities and into other spaces and times—on that level you are simply dealing with pure emotional and intellectual experience, with no words or images at all. That perception is not conveyed to you through words or images, nor through language or by anyone telling you something; it is your direct perception. What you use then are all the most direct perceptions of the inner senses.

These experiences are later translated into dreams. They must return to the region of physical material that is more familiar to consciousness, where a great creative synthesis takes place.

What you first get is pure emotional and intellectual experience; then these are translated into dreams. They must return to the region of physical material that is more familiar to consciousness—that is, the region of material substance. There is a great deal of material from the physical world for you to choose from: houses, scenes, all kinds of material for you to choose. Then at this point a great creative synthesis happens: you combine these materials, according to the process of dream translation, into a dreamscape.

And with a great creative diversification, in which any dream image is created, meaningful to the self on all its different levels.

You create figures, plots, and stories made from the material of the physical world; these processes are helpful to all levels of this person.

On one level, it represents a truth you have practiced; on another level, it represents that truth as it is more specifically applied to various experiences or problems.

On different levels, it may be only a truth turned into imagery, a principle; but on another level, it may represent a result, a lived experience, of that principle applied in practice. So the meaning of this dream is not the same for you on every level.

Therefore, one symbol is transformed into many symbols.

The conceptual knowledge and pure emotional and intellectual knowledge you first obtain may be only one thing, but after translation it becomes many varied images. One image then turns into many symbols.

And your conscious mind may perceive only a swirling multitude of dream images.

Within your mind, you can only feel that the dream is wildly complex and the dream images swirl.

Because the inner organization and unity are partially hidden in other regions of consciousness.

The dream itself is not aimed only at your conscious level; it comes from the deeper unconscious, or from other realities, levels, and dimensional spaces. Because you organize it with material from the physical world into a dream you can understand, a translated dream, what you see is chaotic and messy. You do not understand its deep meaning at all—because the other parts of the dream are still hidden in other places where you cannot see the whole. Some dreams skip around and their plots are discontinuous, because those plots did not happen on this level at all; they happened on that other level.

The mind that loves reasoning cannot follow it back.

It has no logic; it is broken off and hidden in the middle, not on this level, but combined from many levels.

Yet the regions of the unconscious and subconscious are far more aware of this material than the ego is. Therefore, generally speaking, the ego receives only a tiny residue of dream material.

Your true self wakes up from a dream and says, "Oh, I remember I had a dream"—that dream is only a tiny residue of your dream material.

"Speakers" can appear as historical figures, as old friends trusted by prophets, or as any guise that can deeply impress the person.

The Speakers appear in all kinds of images that can influence you—historical figures, people you admire, prophets, old friends you trust, or any other image or guise that can give you a deep impression—to give you some impressions.

However, in that original experience, the true nature of the "Speakers" is obvious.

In that most original process of the "Speakers" communicating with you—before you have analyzed or decoded it—its purpose is obvious—although after you wake up you forget it, or distort and translate away its essential nature.

The making of dreams is just as much a work requiring mature skill as the making of any person's objective life.

The making of your dreams, just like your objective life—our physical life—requires skilled, accomplished work. It is like something we have done often and know very well. How each person assembles their dreams, weaves their dreams, and how you arrange your life in waking life are the same; it requires long familiarity and skill.

Session 571

He finished speaking in this session, but the chapter is not over yet. In Session 571 he only said two sentences.

You can also experience this directly from the waking state.

He is saying you do not necessarily have to enter that subconscious or unconscious state to experience it; you can also experience it directly in the waking state, to examine these different stages of consciousness and the fluctuations of psychic activity. You do not have to do it in dreams or in an unconscious state; you can also do it while awake.

In the next chapter, we will let you become more aware of these ever-active portions of your own reality.

That is, in the next chapter he will let you observe the different levels and different strata of your own consciousness while awake. Starting from the next chapter, he begins to discuss the division of consciousness into several levels. In Chapter 18 he is discussing the various stages of consciousness, the various levels, the various levels in between, their symbolic nature, and their multiple points of intersection — that is the content we will cover later.

注释与核实

1. This claim could not be verified. ↩

2. Source: Wikipedia, "Conversations with God" (https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/%E8%88%87%E7%A5%9E%E5%B0%8D%E8%A9%B1) ↩ ↩² ↩³

3. Source: Wikipedia, "Doctor Strange (2016 film)" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Doctor_Strange_(2016_film)) ↩

4. This claim could not be verified. ↩

5. Source: Wikipedia, "Agama" (https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E9%98%BF%E5%90%AB%E7%B6%93) ↩

6. Source: UNESCO Memory of the World Programme, "Huang Di Nei Jing (Yellow Emperor's Inner Canon)" (https://www.unesco.org/en/memory-world/huang-di-nei-jing-huangdineijing-yellow-emperors-inner-canon) ↩ ↩²

7. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Yijing" (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Yijing) ↩

8. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Xuanzang | Biography & Facts" (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Xuanzang) ↩

9. Source: Wikipedia, "Investiture of the Gods" (https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-tw/%E5%B0%81%E7%A5%9E%E6%BC%94%E4%B9%89) ↩

10. This claim could not be verified. ↩ ↩² ↩³ ↩⁴ ↩⁵ ↩⁶ ↩⁷ ↩⁸ ↩⁹

11. This claim could not be verified. ↩

12. According to Mike's original words, it was "nailed to the cross and burned to death"; upon verification, it should be "according to the four Gospels, Jesus was nailed to the cross and died by crucifixion (he expired around the ninth hour and was then buried), not burned to death." (Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Crucifixion (Christianity)", https://www.britannica.com/topic/Crucifixion-Christianity) ↩

13. Source: Technical University of Munich (TUM), "Using thoughts to control airplanes" (https://www.tum.de/en/news-and-events/all-news/press-releases/details/31535) ↩

14. Source: Wikipedia, "Proof of Heaven" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_Heaven) ↩

15. Source: Roesler, C., "Jung on the Nature and Interpretation of Dreams: A Developmental Delineation with Cognitive Neuroscientific Responses" (https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4217604/) ↩

16. Source: Aserinsky, E. & Kleitman, N., "Regularly Occurring Periods of Eye Motility, and Concomitant Phenomena, During Sleep" (1953), as cited in Peever & Fuller, "Who discovered REM sleep?", SLEEP (https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article/47/1/zsad232/7259816) ↩