Mike's commentary · Seth Speaks, Chapter 20

The "Reading Guide" and "Chapter Highlights" for this chapter were summarized by an AI editor based on the main text below; they are not things Mike said during his 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 concentrates on answering fifty-two questions raised by Rob, Jane, and visitors, covering the nature, number, and training of the Speakers, EE units and faster-than-light particles, the relationship between matter and consciousness, the theory of evolution, animal consciousness, the simultaneity of time, pain and suffering, out-of-body experiences, and the cooperative relationship among Rob, Jane, and Seth in the transmission of the Seth material. In his replies, Seth repeatedly explains that consciousness precedes matter, that time is not linear, that EE units are the initial form of reality, and points out that pain is a by-product of creative energy gone astray.

Key Points of This Chapter

• There are many Speakers, but their abilities vary. There are fewer than thirty great Speakers, and most of their work is done in nonphysical states.
• EE units are emanations of consciousness, the initial form of reality; some particles move faster than light, and matter did not evolve consciousness out of lifeless matter.
• Time is not linear; seconds and minutes have no independent reality in themselves, but are only the psyche's way of organizing experience. All That Is is not finished, and perfection is not the endpoint.
• Illness and suffering are byproducts of creative energy gone astray. Suffering in itself does no good to the soul, unless it teaches one how to stop suffering.
• Animals have varying degrees of self-consciousness. Animal consciousness is not the reincarnation of human souls; a person can project part of his energy into an animal form, but that is not the same as reincarnation.

Main Text

Let's look at this chapter. He divided it into many small sections, answering the questions that Rob, Jane, and their friends had collected. The questions filled five pages of typed paper, fifty-two in all. Let's see how he answered them.

Rob said that these questions would be more effective if asked after carefully studying the material in this book. Jane said there was no time for that now — that was the first point: there was no time constraint. The second point: what she really meant was to go by intuition, not to be so strict in the requirements. She felt that intuition was the best arrangement.

About the Speakers

The first question, Rob asked: Will you tell me something about this third Christ? Seth did not answer, because there is a later chapter devoted specifically to religion, so he did not want to discuss religious issues here. Rob then asked, does that mean the material about the Speakers is also excluded? Seth said no, the material on the Speakers can be discussed, but he did not want to discuss religious issues.

The second question, Rob asked: When Jane was speaking for you, was the statement that there are thousands upon thousands of Speakers correct, or was it distorted? He was hung up on this point. You remember in Chapter 17, Session 568, when the Speakers were mentioned, Rob asked Seth whether Ruburt was also a Speaker, and Seth said yes, and added: Rob, you are one too. Then the two of them were quite surprised, and felt that Seth was flattering them. Seth said there are thousands upon thousands of Speakers, so you need not feel so flattered. But the two of them found it very strange, whether there really could be that many Speakers.

Session 578

Seth said that the statement about thousands of Speakers has not been distorted. Speakers are endowed with different talents according to their own personalities, and some have far greater abilities than others; the abilities among Speakers are not the same. But:

They all played a role in the dissemination of inner information.

So in your terms, some Speakers would be more accomplished than others. In our terms, that is, from our human perspective; from a higher level, there is no such thing as greater or lesser accomplishment. But for example, the truly important Speakers, particularly the number of truly important Speakers, is far smaller than the number given. He said there are fewer than thirty great Speakers.

Remember here, he said the Christ entity is one, and Buddha is another. Speakers are just as active when their physical bodies are without physical form as when they have physical form -- it is not that after Christ died, or after Buddha entered nirvana, they stopped speaking. They continue speaking just the same when they are without physical form. Before the Christ entity appeared as the so-called Christ "personality," there had been many reincarnations. The same was true of Buddha; Buddha himself also said he had many reincarnations, and on one occasion he directly fed himself to a tiger¹.

The greatest Speakers not only translate and transmit inner information, but compared with other Speakers connected to your physical reality system, they also penetrate more deeply into the inner realms of these realities. Thus they augment the basic inner information.

These Speakers do not only come to disseminate information; they also augment that information. They do so by penetrating deeply into the inner realms of our reality -- like Buddhism and Christianity, they have exerted great influence on the development of the entire human civilization, changing much of the psychological structure of the human psyche. So while doing this, they not only transmit inner information, but also add to it.

The greatest Speakers do not require the intensive training that most people must undergo. Their unique combination of characteristics makes this unnecessary. On another level, Emerson was also a Speaker², you can look that up. There was also a person named Mobundo, from Africa in the fourteenth century BC³, this one is very hard to look up, something that happened three thousand four hundred years ago. In Africa, he was also a Speaker, a great Speaker.

In all states of existence of every kind, Speakers are far more active than most people.

Whether these states of existence are physical or nonphysical, whether waking or sleeping, between lives, or on other levels of reality, these Speakers do not transmit the teachings only when they are in the human world; they transmit the teachings at all times and in all places.

Just as certain physical data are transmitted by the structure of genetic factors, so this inner information is also preserved in coded form within whatever psychological structure the Speaker inhabits.

Where does what the Speakers transmit come from? Many people have asked this question, and he will explain it later. Actually, the content he wishes to transmit is all within his own inner, psychic structure. This psychological structure does not exist only when there is a physical body; it is the same in other reality spaces. Speakers can more easily access that inner information which exists in coded form than ordinary people can, though they often need a trigger to release it. This trigger may occur while awake, or sometimes in dreams; it is not fixed.

The use of the trigger is to open the storehouse of knowledge and allow past training to be put to use.

The trigger is the key that opens the treasure house of knowledge.

The First Speaker

At this point Seth demonstrated his telepathic ability -- before Rob even asked, he knew he had this question: could he point out who the first Speaker was, his name or a description of him.

Seth said that, in a broader sense, there is no such thing as a first Speaker. It is like imagining yourself being in ten places at the same moment, and you really do send a part of yourself to each of these ten places. Each of the ten parts then has conscious awakening, alertness, and perception. So how can you say which one came first and which one came later? And as the you within these ten, each of these ten places would be aware of your existence. You could not ask which of the ten arrived first -- unless someone wanted to go visit the initiator of each of these ten places, and begin to understand all of this.

The Speakers are the same. They did not begin transmitting the teachings only at the moment when they might have appeared -- that is, the moment of physical appearance or nonphysical appearance. The question here is one of no time and no space, of simultaneity without time. Under this premise, asking which one began first has no real meaning. But we can understand Rob's question -- Rob's question was, on the level of this earth, who began first and who began later, but Seth did not answer this question for him. Seth said they were simultaneous.

The Source of the Speaker Material

The third question: What is the source of the Speaker material? That is, where did the material that was first spoken come from? Seth says:

The original Speaker material comes from the innate inner knowledge of the nature of reality that everyone possesses.

The Speaker material comes from the innate inner knowledge of the nature of reality that everyone has. The Speakers had to keep this information alive in the human world, not let people bury it within and block it, and bring this teaching -- the teaching of these so-called Speakers -- to the attention of the conscious self. That is, bring the nature of reality that everyone actually knows within to the conscious level of each person so that people notice it, rather than leaving it buried beneath consciousness all the time. In other words, from another angle, they spoke the inner secrets -- what they spoke were the inner secrets of each and every one of you.

Practically speaking, as was mentioned earlier in this book, in some civilizations they played a far more important role.

Sometimes they were continuously, ego-centrically aware of this information; sometimes they did not, like ordinary people, have to go to the bottom layer of consciousness to obtain this material. When they obtained it, at that time it was remembered. The Speakers of that era realized this: that most innate inner material is always available at the unconscious level of every person. Everyone can obtain it, but because it is at the unconscious level, it is very hard for you to get it. So what did they do then? They made use of memory, casting this information onto the physical brain -- because it was unconscious, you see. These Speakers had this ability: to take the information obtained from the unconscious and record it at the conscious level of the brain.

In any case, for them there was always a great deal of interaction between the inner and the outer.

It is the same for us now; our inner and outer are always communicating. Meaningful information obtained in the dream state was remembered in the morning. The meaningful information we obtain in dreams can be remembered in the morning, just like today for us. The inner you and the outer you are always communicating.

One Speaker's dream helped another review his lessons. This is his vivid analogy: what you bring back in dreams is some of your inner information and knowledge. It helped those ordinary people he wanted to teach review their lessons -- why call it reviewing lessons? Because they all already have this knowledge; everyone has it, so it is called reviewing lessons.

On the other hand, appropriate physical material was also passed from one to another in the dream state. Both states were also highly utilized.

Which two states? One is nonphysical, such as in dreams when he was teaching others, transmitting the teaching to others; and the other is appropriate physical material -- some physical material was also passed from one to another in the dream state. Both existed -- physical and nonphysical.

The fifth question: Were there Speakers among Jesus' twelve disciples? He says this will be left for the chapter on religion; he will not talk about it now.

Cooperation Between Lives

Can Speakers cooperate with us when they are between lives? Seth said he had already answered this -- and indeed he had answered it earlier: they help us when we are awake, when we are asleep, and when they are between lives. Then he said it again:

They can, and they do.

He said that the two of you -- Rob and Jane -- have both been trained by other Speakers who are between lives, and you are being trained right now. This happens in your dream state. The Speakers themselves have each attained their own degree of efficiency, and clearly the levels are not the same.

This material could lead to more questions -- for example, who is training us? Did we know them in past lives? And so on. But Rob said he did not know what to do, so he did not ask any of them.

Then Seth went on:

Most of their work is done in the nonphysical state.

Remember, most of the Speakers' work is done in the nonphysical state. Earthly life -- our life when we are awake -- is somewhat like a very important field trip: after the training is done, the field trip is our ordinary three-dimensional world life, theory plus practice. In dreams, in the unconscious state, most of the learning, or review, takes place; when we wake up, our life in the human world is actually putting that learned knowledge to the test in the field.

Seth Two and the Ancient Manuscripts

He asked, will you talk about Seth Two in this book? Seth said I certainly will, but let us not discuss that for now. Seth Two is Seth's second Seth -- if Seth is to me, for example, what an entity is to us, then Seth's entity is what we call Seth Two, the one who is even higher than Seth.

He asked again, are you the medium for Seth Two? Seth said we will talk about that later; this question is not very significant.

In Chapter Seventeen it was said that before Jane could transmit a Speaker manuscript, she needed more training, and even then, the work involved might take five years. He asked what kind of training requires such a long time. Seth said that at that time it referred specifically to:

What you would call an ancient Speaker manuscript.

Rob said yes, that is what I meant. Seth said:

Even though the original language has been translated, Ruburt is still unfamiliar with many of the words they used, and there are even differences in basic concepts.

Because the language of that ancient era is already different from ours. If the purity of the translation is to be maintained, various kinds of inner sense training are necessary. Some of these languages deal with pictures and with non-verbal elements, and some of the symbols in that material carry multi-element, multi-dimensional meanings. Transmitting this information through Ruburt would be an extremely difficult task, because it contains multi-dimensional meanings within it. But it is still possible to transmit.

Because often words are hidden within pictures, and pictures are hidden within words.

We speak of manuscripts, but most of these were not written down. Some were written down, but only at a much later time -- after several thousand years of history had passed. Part of what was preserved exists underground and in caves, in Australia, parts of Africa, and one region of the Pyrenees⁴.

The Conscious Training of Speakers

The ninth question relates to Seth's perception while speaking through Jane. He said there are now two questions, which one do you want me to answer first? We'll call this question 11A.

He asked Seth: Do you agree that the Seth material you are now giving me is a form of speaker training for me and Jane? Isn't speaker training always unconscious? Are you consciously training us as speakers?

Seth said he indeed is. In your terms:

When an individual reaches his last physical life, this inner information must be consciously recognized, so that all portions of the personality are familiar with it at his death.

When a person is in his final reincarnation, this inner information must be consciously recognized by himself. If you still have reincarnations ahead of you, many people are not interested in this spiritual material, and one possibility is that they still need many more reincarnations. Why are some people so interested in this inner material? Because some people are not coming back. When they are not coming back, the inner information must surface on their conscious level. When it surfaces on the conscious level, then at the time of his death — remember, your consciousness at death is the same as your consciousness while alive. It is not that because you die, you automatically gain access to the unconscious information at the bottom layer of consciousness. Whether dead or alive, your sensory system is not much different; your consciousness and your thoughts are all the same. So in this final reincarnation of yours, before you die, you must bring all your inner information to the surface and let your surface consciousness become aware of it. That way, after you die, you will know the inner information you know, and all parts of you will know it, rather than it existing only on the bottom layer of consciousness as before.

Thus the personality will no longer be swept back into another earthly life whether or not he wills it.

Otherwise, this situation is very likely to happen. If this information is brought from the bottom layer to the surface, then this personality will not be forced back into an earthly life whether he wants to return or not — he will be swept back. Swept back means he does not want to return, because he has already completed his cycle of reincarnations.

When his earthly life has some attachments and attractions for him — for example, he has some loved ones, some things he cannot let go of — this inability to let go is a primary reason for him returning to the earthly realm. But when he brings out all the inner information, he understands: so these are all probable selves, and this is what all the reincarnations are about. When he understands this, he will no longer be attracted by those things that could sweep him back into the next reincarnation. He understands what his mission is. Otherwise, if you do not understand, you are easily swept back.

His own conscious physically oriented portion becomes acquainted with the inner information.

Previously, ordinary people were not familiar with it, but his conscious portion has become familiar with it. To a certain degree:

He consciously perceives that the reality of thought is the innovator behind matter.

This is what we now call belief creates reality, or thought creates reality, or intention creates reality — all mean the same thing. He understands that the reality of thought is the innovator behind physical reality.

Such a personality, after death, at the moment of death, can understand the nature of the various illusions and enter the next plane of existence with clear awareness.

Those of us who have studied this Seth material, when you die, you will be very clear and enter the next plane with clear awareness. You will not have confusion or anything like that, because you already know all that bottom-layer information.

The information that has been brought to the conscious level is then passed on to others.

Because he brought it to the surface consciousness, after his death he also knows this material, and then he passes it on to others through other means. He does not necessarily have to return in physical form to teach; he may also help others during the stage between two lives.

Seth's Mode of Perception

The ninth question: You told me you would discuss in detail what you perceive when you speak through Jane and fill the room, and in that ESP class session you said you yourself entered a trance state, and the effort you needed in order to align with us in our space and time. This part was already covered in the last section of the previous chapter, and he repeated it again. Just look it over carefully; I will go over it briefly and not expand on it in detail -- later in this chapter there are parts that are very deep and difficult, while the earlier parts are not very difficult, so let us start with the simpler parts and move through them quickly.

My perception of the people in a room is very different from their own perception of themselves.

That is, Seth's perception of a person is very different from that person's perception of himself.

I can perceive their various past and future personalities, but I cannot perceive their probable selves.

You must remember this: Seth can see a person's past lives and future, but he cannot see that person's probable selves.

I see the various faces they have taken in reincarnation, and to you it would seem as if you were watching a set of rapidly moving images, all representing the various postures of one person.

These moving images, with the various faces rapidly shifting, represent the various postures of one person.

When communicating with the people in the room, I must remember to limit my comments and focus only on the present self of this particular reincarnation.

Because what he sees is all of this person's past lives and future lives, lifetime after lifetime, both present and future, all visible. But when he talks or communicates with this person, he must aim at and focus on the person in this current reincarnation. You cannot speak to his past life, and you cannot speak to his future life. You can only speak to the fragment personality of this present lifetime, and at the present point in time of this lifetime, the one sitting in the room. There are also many things that have not yet happened to him that you can see, but you cannot talk about those things, because for him those things have not happened yet.

He says he himself sees this composite image -- we might better call it a holographic image; he calls it a composite image -- meaning all the faces of this person's lifetime after lifetime appear. But this holographic image does not appear on Jane's eyes. Although Seth communicates with physical people through Jane's channeling, he does not see through Jane's eyes. Jane cannot see these holographic images, because:

Her eyes do not have the perceptual capacity necessary for multidimensional depth.

That is, Jane's eyes do not yet have this kind of multidimensional spatial perception.

Whether or not I am looking through Jane's eyes, it does not matter; I clearly see this composite image.

Why would I use her eyes? What Jane's eyes see is only the person of this present lifetime; Jane cannot see those past and future lives. So Seth uses Jane's eyes to locate this person in the present personality, to pick him out and select him from among the many personalities.

Communicating with your system in this way requires tremendous effort and even greater discernment.

Communicating with our system is not as simple as people imagine. When Seth comes and communicates with someone, he sees that every person is a holographic image, and all your lifetime after lifetime is contained within it.

Usually this varies according to the distance between the communicator and the physical system.

"Distance" is put in quotation marks -- it is not spatial distance, but distance in terms of levels. Earlier in Chapter Nineteen there was much discussion of how consciousness has many levels. This depends on how far the level of consciousness of the communicator who wants to communicate with our physical world is from us.

My base is not within the physical system, so I must enter your reality at a precise time, at the precise point in space and time upon which you are focused. This requires accuracy, and this is where discernment comes into play.

For Seth's side there is no time; he does not have our concept of physical time. But he must use discernment -- as if he had a watch, he must know exactly what hour and minute and what time to communicate with our people, and he must also arrive at this position in our space and time. This requires very strong discernment.

I can know the present and future experiences of the people in the room, just as real as their present experiences.

Precisely because of this, I must remember what they consider to have already happened, and what has not yet happened -- because to me these two are the same; to Seth, past and present experiences are all things that have already happened.

But these patterns of activity are also constantly changing. At this point many people say, so are the future and history already fixed? Then what meaning does my individual effort still have? He says that is not the case:

For example, when I say I perceive your past and future actions and thoughts, what I actually perceive are patterns that are forever in variation and change.

Seth says I tell you I see their past actions and thoughts, but what I observe is a pattern that is forever in variation and change. This pattern includes both future and past. Every person has a behavioral pattern and a pattern of thinking about problems, and what he sees is this pattern, including past and future. This pattern is relatively fixed, but the events within it can all change.

Some things I see that are clearly connected to these people in the future may not occur in your physical system. They exist as probabilities, as potentials, realized in thought but not yet transformed into definite, concrete form.

The futures Seth sees do not necessarily happen in our present three-dimensional world; they still exist as a kind of probability. They are something formed in thought, concerning the future, but have not yet become a definite, concrete form.

I have told you that nothing is predestined.

You must remember this point: it is not that the future is fixed and set in stone. Like the developer in that American TV series, who believed that if there were a quantum computing system with sufficient computational power, it could make precise predictions about the future -- he cited various algorithms, including multiple-reference algorithms that could achieve this. He says that is not the case; the future is not predestined.

I must focus on a date that to you is in the future, and explore all its detailed branches, in order to determine which of the possible actions I earlier saw within you will be actualized.

What is discussed here is the core issue that many people care about regarding the future and fortune-telling: Is fortune-telling accurate or not? If fortune-telling is accurate, then what meaning does our striving still have? If fortune-telling is not accurate, then what meaning does the unity of past, present, and future that we speak of have? He says it very clearly: if I want to explore the future you are asking about, I must aim at a particular period in the future -- for us it might be a certain year, month, day, and moment, but for him there is no such period -- he aligns with that point in our space and time, and then explores all the details at that temporal and spatial node, all the detailed branches, in order to determine which of the possible actions I earlier saw within this person's inner being might be actualized.

This is also what he meant at the very beginning when he said I can see this person's past and future, but I cannot see his probable systems -- what he meant by that is exactly this.

Communication Methods and Training

He continued:

The methods of communication may vary to a great degree.

A communicator based in physical reality -- say, this person between lives -- would find it easier in many respects to communicate with you. He himself comes from the physical world, and when communicating with us he can relate well, because he too once lived on Earth as a human being. But however, the information or intelligence he can give will also be limited by his experience -- he has not experienced other times and spaces or things in other realities.

In any case, I do have a memory of an earthly life, and this automatically helps me when translating your psychic data into physical form.

Because Seth has a memory of an earthly life, when he translates each person's psychic data into physical form, it automatically helps him.

Here the use of Ruburt's senses is also of great help. Sometimes I see the people in this room as they see what they see, or rather as their sense mechanisms perceive it.

Rather than saying I see them, it is more accurate to say I sense them through the senses. In this situation I translate and read that data -- that is, he uses the perceptual system to perceive them, and after perceiving that data, he uses it, calls upon it, and employs it just as you would use data in a computer.

The tenth question: Would you tell me about the methods by which you made contact before these sessions began? That is, before these sessions were transmitted, how did Seth make contact with Jane. He said that in an earlier chapter he had already mentioned some of this.

Most of Jane's training was accomplished in the dream state. She often attended classes in an out-of-body condition. In the beginning she was taught by various speakers. The information thus gained was often brought to the conscious level through poetry.

Many people came to train her, and then brought her information to Jane's conscious level through the medium of poetry. For Jane, these were a kind of inspiration.

There was intensive training in focusing inward, an exterior environment that forced her to look inward for answers, and a strong religious background within which the initial growth could occur. That is enough.

Jane had a religious background in her early years -- she attended Catholic church schools from childhood, and had a very strong religious background. He said this religious background allowed certain things to develop. This was an exterior environment that forced Jane to look inward for answers. It was not because of religion itself; it was because Jane did not fit in at that Catholic church school. She did not fit in with those rules, with those things, and she did not fit in with the whole environment either. In that situation, she had no friends and no one to talk to, so she turned much of her outward focus inward. At that time, the initial growth within her was able to occur. Seth said that was enough -- for Jane, her internal training was already sufficient.

Observing Daily Life

He looked at questions 12, 13, and 14, and said these are all reincarnation material, so let's not discuss them for now. He skipped to question 19:

When you are not speaking through Jane, are you interested in perceiving our daily lives? For example, like an observer watching how we live — is that possible?

Seth said I have not formed the habit of observing you — he just denied it outright. What is there to see in such trivial matters?

But we are connected in our psychological gestalt, so I am aware of any strong feeling on your part, or any strong reaction of any kind.

What he said here is somewhat ambiguous: we can sense these feelings of yours through the inner telepathic system, but that does not mean I pay attention to everything about you or perceive all your affairs.

But I always break down the feelings I receive from you into definite details.

I break down the feelings and sensations I receive from you into definite details. Therefore I am generally aware of your situation. If anything disturbs Ruburt, he automatically sends me news of him — within the limitations he has mentioned. He mentioned that he has said many times before: I know about the future events of your lives, within certain limits, but I cannot tell you.

I am far more concerned with the vitality of your entire soul than with what you had for breakfast.

Seth's point is that he is more concerned with the growth of your two souls than with what you have been doing in the three-dimensional world.

He said, all right, very interesting. I don't know whether it was a break or the end. Finally he said, regarding the question about the theory of evolution and fragment personalities, let's not discuss that for now — that's all for today. He said your questions were quite good. So he was reassured.

In this first session he answered roughly a dozen or so questions, and that was it. So our interpretation of this part ends here, and we will continue with the next section in the following session.

Let's look at the content of this part. At the beginning Rob asked: should we ask questions first, or do you want some personal material? Personal material means that during these transmissions, there is often material concerning Rob and Jane personally, not for the general public — he calls this personal material. Then Seth said, ask the questions first, because the content of this chapter is all about asking questions. Rob said: shall we ask a question first? Seth said: go ahead and ask.

All That Is Is Not Finished

Rob's question was: If everything exists in the present, how can there be increase through constant creation and expansion? That is to say, if everything exists in the present, with neither past nor future, then how can what is in the present expand or increase? In other words, if we are constantly creating, then how can the present of All That Is exist in a finished form?

Seth said that All That Is is not finished or concluded. We always have a feeling that All That Is is high above, already completed, already fixed in form, like an unmoving, most primordial universe where everything is utterly calm. He said it is not like that. All That Is has no ending and no completion; it is changing every moment.

Session 580

In your three-dimensional system, everything happens simultaneously. Every action creates its own other possibilities, or other actions, arising from the infinite energy of a universe that is never still. The answer is that the whole is more than the sum of its parts.

In our physical world, all actions happen simultaneously, and every action has effects in other dimensions and spaces or other possibilities, and produces other things. And this never-still action arises from the infinite energy of the universe. So we ordinarily think that the parts added together should equal the whole, but he says the whole is more than the sum of its parts. Why is it more? Because it has many other things that we do not yet know about.

All That Is simultaneously and endlessly creates itself.

You must understand this: it is simultaneous, simultaneously and endlessly creating itself. Only within our particular reference framework, that is, our three-dimensional world, does there seem to be a contradiction between this simultaneous and yet endless action. We always think that endless action must correspond to endless time, and that it is impossible to have endless action within the same time. So for our three-dimensional world, this is a contradiction.

He says this is mainly a distortion caused by problems with our concept of time, and by the concept of duration. Our concept of time is deeply ingrained, so it is very hard for us to understand that All That Is is both simultaneous and engaged in endless action.

Because for us, duration presupposes existence within a time framework, and it already presumes a beginning and an end.

As soon as we speak of existence, there is a before existence and an after existence, and there is a beginning and an end to that existence. So as soon as we speak of duration, it involves temporality. This is a characteristic of our time framework, and there is nothing we can do about it.

Experience that exists outside this reference framework (that is, the three-dimensional world we are familiar with) does not depend on what we call duration in order to exist.

In this world outside the three-dimensional world, those experiences do not need a duration in order to exist; they do not need a time framework to match them. These events are all produced at the same time, happening simultaneously.

It has no perfect ending, and there is no perfection that has been completed. Any experience that goes beyond it would be impossible and meaningless.

Any experience that goes further beyond this point of perfection would be meaningless, and also impossible. He says All That Is is the source of infinite and endless simultaneous action; everything happens at the same time, yet there is no beginning and no end as you call them, and therefore at any given point there is also nothing that you would call completed.

Your concepts of development and growth imply a single-line progression toward perfection.

In our concepts, the ideas of development, growth, and progress themselves imply that you must move toward a perfect result. So for you, it will be very hard to imagine that kind of omnipresent order — the endless order in which all things happen at the same time.

A finished, ended god — we often imagine god that way. Or that All That Is would eventually suffocate its creation — it would suffocate, too boring, too monotonous. Because once everything enters perfection, it means nothing will ever change again, and it enters a dead loop, a frozen state. Because perfection presumes a point beyond which development is impossible. You have given perfection a definition: perfection is a point, and beyond this point no further development is possible, because it is already perfect, and creativity has reached its end. That would be abnormal; the world would stop.

Speaking of this, you can understand a most fundamental principle: in our human life, in our concepts, we are always unconsciously or deliberately pursuing perfection. No matter what the result, we pursue perfection in our emotions, in our material life, in our career, in our studies — in every aspect we want to pursue perfection. Even if it is not perfect, we are still on the road to pursuing perfection. This is a concept we humans often have — treating perfection as the goal we pursue.

Now you see this and you understand: even All That Is, which created this world, cannot itself reach such a state of perfection. We, as its spokesperson or one of its lines of sight in the three-dimensional world, pursue perfection — how could that be possible? So you must get rid of this concept of pursuing perfection along a single line. Any idea that there is an endpoint, a goal, and that once you reach that place you can rest forever, is wrong and does not conform to the essential characteristics of this universe. The essence of this universe is endless motion; there will not appear the kind of pure land you imagine, where you can live forever and ever doing nothing. There is no such place.

If there were such a perfection, there would be an order in which only determinism could rule. Every part would fit together according to a special order, with no freedom to alter the pattern given to it.

If a perfect result existed, then it would become determinism — since there is a perfect ending, then the result of all our development is heading toward that ending, and then there would necessarily be a special order corresponding to this perfect ending. No matter how many roads there are, in the end you must all head toward that perfection. Then it would become a relatively fixed order, with no freedom.

In fact, order does exist, but within this order there is freedom. Creative freedom, and the characteristics of All That Is, guarantee its endless becoming — always in the midst of change.

Pursuing Perfection Is Wrong

This is something you must understand; it is deeply ingrained in everyone who has spent decades in this world under the influence of human society. Whenever we think about anything, we think about a perfect version. For example, when we study knowledge we also want it to be perfect; when we transmit the Dharma -- for example, when the Buddha transmitted the Dharma, in the end it had to reach a perfect state -- and each person's spiritual practice also wants to reach a perfect state. Wanting everything to be perfect is a wrong view. If your goal is to pursue perfection, then at the root it is wrong. What you want is creation; the world you came into is creation, not the pursuit of some result or some goal.

In that endless becoming, there are some states you would call already perfect. If there were no creativity within it, all experience would be destined to come to an abrupt stop.

In this process, there is a state where you would say, "This is already very perfect." If there were not also strong creativity within this perfection, then the state that has reached perfection would abruptly stop, and all experience would also abruptly stop.

But this great complexity is not actually hard to handle; it is actually as simple as a seed -- a single seed has endless possibilities. What is complexity? It is that everything is in the process of becoming; nothing has a fixed outcome, and there is no final ending given to you. You always want to ask what the final ending of the universe is; many people want to ask this question. It even appears in my messages: people say, "Then what exactly is our ultimate purpose?" What is the ultimate purpose of the soul? What is the ultimate purpose of the universe? What is the ultimate purpose of All That Is? People have this kind of thinking: in all matters they want an ultimate end. They also want there to be a beginning: How did the universe come about? What is it trying to do? What final goal is it trying to reach? Do all these questions not imply a beginning, a result, or an ending? But in a state without time, endless and infinite, if you presuppose a beginning and an ending, then the question itself is meaningless. So this kind of question is wrongly asked; if you want to seek an answer to this question, it is impossible.

All That Is is infinite, and in a way you cannot yet understand, infinity is hidden within simultaneous action.

He paused for a while, then continued:

All That Is is alive even within its own humblest parts. For example, it is even aware within a molecule.

We think that within the very smallest molecule of the universe, All That Is is alive -- it is alive, not a dead molecule.

All That Is gives all of its parts, or its creations, its own ability.

All That Is gives its ability to all its parts and its creations. Our soul is a small fragment, a small part of All That Is, so the parts to which All That Is gives itself include our soul. Everything All That Is creates, including our soul, including the personality fragments that the soul creates downward, including this self of ours that is presently expressed in physical form in this lifetime -- all are its creations. It gives them its own ability; it can be alive, it can create everything.

Then those abilities turn into inspiration, impetus, guidance, or principles.

That is, this ability that creates all things turns into the inspiration, impetus, guidance, and principles we can feel, and into these things in our actual actions.

Yet these parts then use it to seek to further create themselves, their own worlds and systems. This is a generous and openhanded gift.

The creator gives its own ability to every person and every tiny thing, and then lets them create their own worlds and systems themselves.

These creations use these forces and abilities in many different ways. In your own case, humanity forms its reality by using these gifts.

In this three-dimensional human world of ours, we have used this kind of creativity to form the reality and the material world around us.

He is learning to use them effectively and properly. It is by using them that he already exists. They form the foundation of human reality.

It is precisely by using these forces and abilities that we humans exist; these abilities and forces form the foundation of human reality.

Within that framework, human individuals and even the whole may seem to be making mistakes, bringing themselves illness, death, or isolation, but they are still using that ability to create a world.

This passage is also highly instructive for our present world. What is the framework? It is that every molecule and every person in this world is using this ability and power to create themselves and their own worlds and systems. Although sometimes from an individual perspective, certain people seem to be making some mistakes -- from an observer's perspective, certain people are doing foolish things, wrong things; even though we think the matter is very foolish, they are still doing it. From the perspective of humanity as a whole, we are also making mistakes -- we are damaging the environment and excessively plundering resources. It seems that the whole of humanity is making mistakes.

He is also saying that they bring themselves much illness. Now in our present pandemic state, we are bringing ourselves so much illness, death, or isolation. Isn't the word "isolation" extremely fitting right now? Everyone stays alone at home, afraid to go out, cut off from others. This corresponds especially closely to our present state. But he says you don't need to worry about it; humanity is still using this kind of ability to create a world, and this is also one kind of creation. Don't think that only brilliant achievements count as creation -- that only when humanity completes a major transformation, or a new invention, or a new leap forward does it count as creation. That is a misunderstanding of us humans.

I see many people talking about this issue: the earth is ascending, the earth is entering a new frequency, and it wants to leap into a better state; this is a filtering mechanism, determining which people can enter the next era and which cannot. These wishes and ideas are good; the starting point may also be good, intending to uplift the whole of humanity and the whole earth. But I cannot agree with this statement itself, because it is too much a human idea -- the essence of this idea, as soon as it arises, is human. Why say it is human? Because only humans have this kind of concept of the better, the more perfect, the continuously progressing, and the continuously developing.

Humanity never understands that all of this, everything, is already happening in this present moment, or has already happened, or is happening right now. This is one point we humans do not quite understand. We always want a better earth and a better future, but we do not know that this better earth and better future is already happening, or has already happened -- in fact, it is happening right now. Whether on our timeline or in other probable systems, it is happening in this one moment. The time and space we are presently experiencing is exactly what we should experience and should go through. In

Observing Your Creations

Humanity learns how to use these abilities more effectively by observing its creations. It checks its inner progress by seeing the physical materialization of its work.

Our outer world is projected from within us. We examine our projections, and then we know to what degree our inner state has developed.

This work (the work of turning the inner into the material) is still a creative achievement. Although at any given time, in your terms, it may produce a tragedy or unspeakable horror.

This act of turning inner creations into material reality is itself a creative achievement. We humans have now created such a global pandemic, and this in itself is also a creative achievement -- we can bring the world to a standstill, and this is the result of our own creation. So here you must remember: these are all your creative achievements. You cannot say the good things are your own creations while the bad things are unclear as to how they happened. Since you acknowledge that the good is created by you, the bad is also created by you.

He says that at a particular time, such as the present (late 2019 and early 2020), we have created such a horrific situation in the present -- unspeakable horror. Is what we are experiencing right now not unspeakable horror? This virus seems to be dispersed everywhere in the air. Those who appear normal, those without symptoms, also carry the virus. You yourself do not know who actually has the virus, because they themselves do not know whether they carry it either. It is as if everyone were a potential virus carrier -- this is extremely terrifying, unspeakable horror, and also a tragedy.

Pain and Suffering

All right, this part of the questions has been explained clearly. He says we are moving on to the next question, question 21: How do you explain the pain and suffering in this world? Indeed, many people have asked this question. In the comments under my post, they said: Since you say all of this is created by us and chosen by us, then why can't we create a better society? Why can't we create a better home? Why do we make ourselves suffer? Why is there still so much pain and so much suffering? What you say is simply unreasonable, unfeeling, and illogical. In English, it simply doesn't make sense. If we are allowed to choose and allowed to create, why would we choose and create a life in which we suffer so much? This is a question countless people have asked.

Seth says: I was just about to explain this. He says he cannot make this clear without giving an example.

A great painting of a battle scene will show the painter's ability.

For example, a battle scene from World War II, or from World War I, or from the Crusades.⁵ A great painter will use his ability to paint a picture of the battle as it was.

When he (the painter), in all its horrifying drama, projects all those inhuman yet all-too-human scenes of war into it, the painter is using his ability.

What ability? The ability to project all those inhuman yet all-too-human scenes of war into it.

In the same way, when man creates a real war, he is likewise using his ability, and this ability becomes very evident.

When the people in the war are also using this kind of ability, this ability becomes very evident. You see, war has two sides to it: on the one hand, there is the inhumanly cruel side — killing people is like cutting down weeds. Nature would never have this kind of cruel slaughter, where taking human life becomes the goal. This is extremely inhuman. On the other hand, war also has its all-too-human side — in war we can see great love. As we once said, "who are the most beloved people," that kind of radiance of human nature in which people prove themselves to one another with their very lives, the discovery of the more precious meaning of life — all of this can be manifested in war. And whether it is the painter painting this war, or the person participating in this war, he is creating.

The painter who paints such a scene may do so for several reasons. First, he may, through depicting such inhuman cruelty, awaken people to see the consequences of such inhuman cruelty, causing them to recoil and change their ways; or because he himself is in such a pathological and chaotic state that he uses his ability in that particular way; or because he is fascinated by the problem of destruction and creation, and by the problem of using creativity to depict destruction.

Such scenes of inhuman cruelty can make humanity fear war, not want war, and develop war-weariness, thereby changing the way they do things. The second possibility is that he himself is in a pathological and chaotic state, and he uses his ability in the manner of those war scenes. The third possibility is that he is especially fascinated by the problem of destruction and creation.

In your wars, you use creativity to create destruction, yet you cannot help but be creative.

What he says is very ironic. In war, our human technological development is faster and more efficient. Much of the technology we use in peacetime today was invented and created by leaps and bounds during wartime — if you carefully go through the history of technological invention, you will know this. All kinds of new weapons, things beyond imagination, things no one could even conceive of, can all be created. The atomic bomb, nuclear physics, the use of nuclear energy — all of these are actually related to war. If it had not been for World War II, if Germany and America had not accelerated their arms race in the later period and invested without regard to cost in the field of the atomic bomb,⁶ it would not have brought about the later rapid development of humanity's use of nuclear physics. In war we use creativity to create destruction, because our creativity is everywhere, and we cannot help but use our creativity. If we do not go and do something meaningful, then we will go and create war.

Illness and Suffering Are Created by You

Illness and suffering are not forced upon you by God, or by All That Is, or by an external factor. These illnesses and sufferings are a by-product of the learning process, created by you.

This definitely needs to be highlighted: these illnesses and sufferings are all created by you.

They are in themselves quite neutral.

They carry no malice. There is no intention to retaliate against you or to punish you by giving you this. There is no such vicious intent. It is neutral. When you realize that these sufferings are neutral, you will not feel so distressed.

On the other hand, your own existence itself, the reality and nature of your earth, the entire existence of these experiences within it, are also created by yourselves, using the ability I just described.

What ability is being used? The ability just mentioned -- whether it is the ability manifested in war, or the ability manifested in other matters, this creative ability.

Illness and suffering are the result of creative energy misdirected.

Just like the war mentioned earlier -- when creativity is used in the wrong place, used for destruction, war happens. Illness and suffering are the same: when your creative energy is used in the wrong place, that is what brings you illness and suffering.

But they are also a part of creativity, and do not come from a different source than health and vitality.

It is not that the inner source of suffering and illness comes from one place, while your vitality and health come from another place. They all come from the same source.

The next sentence is very important:

Suffering is not good for the soul, unless it teaches you how to stop suffering. That is its purpose.

You must remember this. This sentence is extremely important. It means that pain and suffering are all created by you. They are a by-product of your learning process -- you did not learn well. You have the ability to create beautiful things, to create a peaceful world, but you did not use it in the right place. When it is used in the wrong place, these sufferings arise: for an individual, it is physical illness and a situation of suffering; for a country, it may be war or a state of hostility between two countries; for humanity as a whole, it may be some even more terrible disaster. This is all the price of our creativity being used in the wrong place, the price of learning. You can simply regard it as the price of learning.

It has no malice in itself. It is not punishing you the way people imagine. This kind of idea has been very, very common recently. I have seen this idea that nature is taking revenge on humanity, that nature is punishing humanity, that nature is teaching humanity a lesson. I think we should not hold any of these views. No one wants to punish you, no one wants to take revenge on you, and no one wants to teach you a lesson. What would it feel like to live with such an idea? That heaven and earth want to take revenge on you because you have not been good to heaven and earth? Then heaven and earth would be far too petty.

Where does this view go wrong? It goes wrong in that all of this is created by you -- this heaven and earth is also created by you, this event is also created by you, all of this is created by you. Where does the talk of revenge come from? Who is taking revenge on whom? You can only say that I did not handle this matter well, that I made a mistake. It is like a child doing an experiment in a laboratory who makes a mistake and sets the laboratory on fire. That is a disaster. But would you say that child had great malice? Did he want to burn someone to death? No. He was simply eager to learn. He wanted to use his creativity. He wanted to know what would happen if these two substances were mixed together.

I give this example to say that in this creative process, we humans also make mistakes, and each of us also makes mistakes. This is a very normal thing. We should accept it with a very tolerant heart, allowing for the mistakes we humans make and the mistakes we as individuals make. Next time we just change it, just correct it. There is no need to use those vicious, resentful thoughts to wonder who is taking revenge on me, who is punishing me, nature is punishing humanity. Always using this human way of thinking to consider things, projecting this narrow, dark human mindset onto others, projecting it onto nature and the universe. Do not think this way. These are all by-products of the process in which people have not used their creativity well. When we humans look back and examine this great pandemic disaster, what we should learn from it and what we should change -- that is what we ought to learn.

Not carrying that resentment of being punished, being retaliated against, being fixed, or that helplessness and passivity, as if this disaster were pushed onto our heads, forced upon us. Saying, "A speck of dust from the times, when it falls on each person, becomes a mountain" -- we often consider things this way. Why do you not think that this mountain is something you brought upon yourself? Why is it a speck of dust from the times? Who makes up these times? Are these times not made up of each one of us?

We must turn this idea around. Only then can the heart be at peace, only then can you face everything in the present moment with equanimity, only then can you have initiative and creativity. When you admit that all of this is caused by you, only then is change possible. When you push all responsibility onto others, this matter cannot possibly change, because you are shirking responsibility. If you do not admit that all of this is caused by ourselves, then how can it change?

Suffering Is for the Purpose of Ending Suffering

I just said this, and I will emphasize it once more: suffering does no good to the soul. Unless the suffering teaches you how to stop suffering. You suffered, you do not want to suffer, and then through the experience of suffering you come to know how not to suffer -- that should be the purpose of suffering. Suffering is for the purpose of not suffering, not for the purpose of deliberately suffering.

Therefore we see some ascetics, including those still in India today. These ascetics suffer for the sake of suffering. They pass iron hooks through their own skin, even through their own bones, shoulder blades or whatever, all kinds of places, piercing them with hooks, constantly creating pain for their physical bodies. When one day they feel the physical body no longer hurts, they feel their spiritual state has risen. From the soul's perspective this is completely wrong -- there is no need to deliberately go looking for suffering when there is none. Many people have this masochistic tendency, or a victim mentality, and this is all mistaken. You do not need to go through suffering in order to grow. You do not. No one needs to go through suffering in order to grow, unless the purpose of experiencing suffering is to stop suffering.

On your particular plane of activity, frankly, no one can fully and completely use all the energy available to them, or completely actualize the entity you sense within, because it is multidimensional.

In the three-dimensional world you can only manifest a part of it; you cannot manifest all of it.

Your inner entity is that blueprint. Ultimately you will measure your actual actions against it, and you strive to express as much of your inner potential as possible.

Within you there is a blueprint, and this blueprint may be the blueprint of your personality for this lifetime, carrying the characteristics of this soul itself. Every person, every soul, is different. You will take actual action by measuring yourself against such a blueprint.

Taking our three-dimensional life as an example, you have a clear positioning of yourself. Many people are not clear, many people are clear, and between not clear and clear you can go searching. What do you want to position yourself as? Once you have positioned yourself, you examine whether your actions fit this positioning according to your own positioning. For example, you want to be a painter, an educator, an entrepreneur, a scientist -- that is fine. That is the positioning of an ideal identity, and we can also call this a blueprint. Then you examine the actions you take every day: do they fit the standard of you as a scientist, an artist, an educator -- if you were a top scientist, how should you live every day? Are you revising your daily way of life according to this standard? Your creativity and potential must be expressed with all your strength, used up completely, expressing all your potential as much as possible.

Within that framework, it is possible to have a sound and healthy mind in a healthy body, and a sound planet.

Within the framework of this blueprint, there is a healthy body, a sound and healthy mind, and also a healthy planet.

The creative energy released and used merely to maintain your planet and your existence is unimaginable.

Merely to maintain the existence of our earth and the human world, including all things upon it, the existence of all these living and nonliving things, the creative energy it needs to call upon, to use, to release is unimaginable.

The amount of energy available to you is so great that it gives you tremendous leeway in its use.

This energy is so great that it gives you tremendous leeway. You can make any attempt, the energy is sufficient, any attempt can be made.

I have mentioned that everyone in your system is learning to handle this creative energy. Since you are still in the process of doing so, you often misdirect it. The tangle and confusion caused by these activities automatically brings you back to inner questions.

Every one of us is learning how to use this creative energy. Since we are still in this process, we often misdirect it, use it incorrectly. These misdirections and misuses lead to much tangle and confusion, and this tangle and confusion automatically brings us back to inner questions. For example, the current pandemic, the broad trends in society -- are these not a kind of confusion, a kind of tangle? This confusion and tangle inevitably makes us think about inner questions -- the outer path no longer works, so we can only turn back and contemplate inner questions. This is what he is telling you.

This session ends here, because afterward they spent the time introducing some private personal material.

On the Question of Faster-Than-Light Particles

This section's content is very important; these are all core questions. On the evening of April 8, three female college students from Rochester, New York came to visit. They discussed Jane's book The Seth Material with great interest, and also gave several questions, asking Seth to answer them in his own book.

Their questions were based on a theory -- a theory Rob had also heard of. A group of scientists hypothesized that there is a class of particles called tachyons that always travel at speeds faster than light. According to Einstein's theory of relativity⁷, in the three-dimensional world no particle's speed can exceed the speed of light⁸, because as an object approaches the speed of light, its mass becomes infinitely large, and there is not enough kinetic energy to push it, and infinite energy does not exist in the three-dimensional world. So one can only approach infinitely, but never reach it -- the speed of light is the speed limit in the three-dimensional world, like a ceiling.

But scientists bypassed this obstacle: they imagined that this hypothetical particle has an imaginary proper mass, rather than a rest mass, meaning its rest mass might be a negative number or an imaginary number. This particle in current science is called a "tachyon," or a superluminal particle, and its speed has never been lower than the speed of light. The question she asked was: is this faster-than-light particle the same as the electromagnetic energy that Seth discussed in The Seth Material, that is, the EE units?

She was a physics student, and her questions were all science-oriented, pointing directly at the core and essence of things. This was completely different from the angle of the questions Rob and Jane asked -- you can see that the questions in the previous chapters went around in circles, but actually all revolved around religious issues; the science student, by contrast, directly asked what EE units actually are.

Matter Has Many Grades

Seth's answer, in the first step, puts forward this: our matter and form have many grades, like many layers, not the single kind of matter we think it is.

Session 581

I have told you before that your physical matter or form has many gradations.

This concept is a bit hard to picture. You can keep in mind: everything I say here is just an example, not the actual reality. Just imagine that inside every physical object there is a small box, and this box can project outward an image—or a physical image, or call it a mold, or call it a form—and it is just this kind of nested, layered structure. So the matter we see now can essentially be imagined as layer upon layer of overlapping images, going from the outermost physical layer all the way inward, until the innermost nonphysical layer, each layer gradually increasing or decreasing.

I remember in the earlier chapters Seth gave the example of a table: you can imagine the table inward as one layer weaker than the next, one layer fainter than the next, like illusory shadows, all the way to a transparent shadow; you can also expand the table outward, and it also becomes fainter and fainter, until in the end it disappears. So when you look at this table, it is like a blurry shadow, made up of many layers.

This is a viewpoint that scientists have not yet recognized—they think matter is just matter, how could it have so many layers? Although scientists are now slowly groping their way forward, their direction is basically like blind men touching an elephant. For example, in superstring theory, the theories about branes, two-dimensional branes and five-dimensional branes⁹, are also a kind of blurry concept, approaching this idea.

Faster-Than-Light Is Real

Seth answered her question directly:

For you, many of the particles in such a construction move faster than your speed of light.

He says "for you," meaning from the three-dimensional perspective. Because from his point of view, there is no limitation of the speed of light, and there is no speed, no fast or slow to speak of. We are only speaking from the human perspective, from the perspective of the three-dimensional world -- the phenomenon of faster-than-light is real, and it truly exists.

Then he explains what light is:

Actually, your light only represents a portion of a spectrum that is even larger than the spectrum you know.

We can all understand this: what we call light has a frequency, and the frequency of visible light is a very narrow band. What is higher than it we cannot see, what is lower than it we also cannot see, but instruments can detect them -- what is lower than light and what is higher than light we all call electromagnetic waves, and light is only a very small frequency band within that. But Seth is not saying this. He is not talking about the infrared and ultraviolet beyond the wavelength range we measure, but rather that above and within this very frequency of light, there are still more spectra that we cannot see and cannot perceive. That is, the visible light you are seeing right now is also not the entirety of light; it is a small portion of a larger spectrum.

When scientists study its properties -- here he says:

When your scientists study its properties, they can only investigate the light that intrudes into the three-dimensional system, and of course this also applies to the study of material forms and structures.

We know that this world is originally of a larger dimension; it is something that manifests within our three-dimensional world, and behind it there are matters of more dimensions, but we cannot see them and cannot perceive them. So we can only study the part that has already revealed itself in the three-dimensional world, and we have no way of knowing what is behind it, so we can never find the truth of the matter.

Let me give a simple example to illustrate that "light is not just the one kind of property we imagine": when you dream, you close your eyes and fall asleep in a pitch-black room -- yet in your dream, is there not also light, also rays of light? Or when your spirit body leaves the body, you have left the body, your body is still sitting there with eyes closed, but when you are out of body, can you not also see things, and is there not also light? Sometimes that light is very beautiful, very dazzling, and the colors exceed what our normal eyes can see. So tell me, what kind of light is that light? Is it the light of our natural world? Is its nature the same? If you can think this through, then you can understand that light is not just the one kind of property in our three-dimensional world. Regarding this question, he will give a detailed introduction in other books -- what light actually is, what kind of camouflage and symbol light is.

The Faster-Than-Light Universe

He went on to say:

There is indeed a universe composed of such faster-than-light particles.

None of the particles we can observe can exceed the speed of light, so we can compare our world to a universe that cannot surpass the speed of light. Since there is a universe composed of particles that cannot exceed the speed of light, there must also be universes composed of particles that can exceed the speed of light. He said:

In your terms, some of these share the same space as your own universe.

These universes composed of faster-than-light particles are not material in nature. They are all around us, sharing the same space as our universe — right within our space, only we do not perceive these particles as mass. Because these particles are traveling faster than light, we do not consider them to have mass — if they had mass, they could not exceed the speed of light. It is just that we cannot perceive their mass as existing.

He said that when these particles slow down:

When these particles slow down, to a certain degree, you do experience them as matter.

That is to say, when their speed drops below the speed of light, we can observe them and perceive them, considering them to be a kind of particle and feeling them to be matter. He said some particles change their speed drastically, now fast, now slow:

Some, now, of these particles alter their velocity violently, and at times appear at your slower rate, usually in cyclic fashion.

That is, these particles are sometimes faster than light and sometimes slower than light, changing their speed in a cyclic manner — not all particles are the same.

The Vortex Motion Inside Particles

Then he said:

Some particles, the vortex motion inside this type of particle, is much faster than the speed of the part moving in its circular orbit.

What does this mean? We generally think of electrons as moving around an orbit -- inside the atomic nucleus there are neutrons and protons, which carry a positive charge; outside the atomic nucleus there are negatively charged electrons, moving around the nucleus, like a satellite circling a planet. But modern scientists believe that it does not travel along its orbit in such a neat and orderly way, but rather appears around the orbit in the form of probability waves. In any case, scientists believe that the speed at which electrons move around the atomic nucleus is close to the speed of light -- the mass of an electron is extremely, extremely small, so it can move at close to the speed of light.

Seth said that the vortex motion inside some particles is much faster than the speed at which the particle moves around the atomic nucleus. This theory is very close to present-day quantum mechanics, or to the speed of string motion in superstring theory. String theory holds that a string is like a line, divided into closed loops and open loops -- a closed loop is like the rubber band a girl uses to tie her hair, while an open loop is like a line segment with two ends. Strings can split, combine, collide, and change from open loops into closed loops. Particles are the vibrations of strings -- it is the different modes and patterns of vibration that produce different particles, and the speed of this vibration itself is superluminal. So this passage from Seth is consistent with that theory.

But do not forget: Seth said these things around 1971 or 1972, while string theory, superstring theory, and M-theory all came about only after the late nineties -- the core advances in superstring theory took place in 1995¹⁰, and it was from that era onward that quantum mechanics made greater progress. More than twenty years before that era of Seth, he had already proposed that the speed of motion inside particles is superluminal, faster than the speed of the outer orbital motion.

Many people criticize Seth, asking whether this is really just a fantasy of Jane's own, or just a second personality she split off, talking to herself? Once you have studied this knowledge, you know that it definitely is not -- this is not something a human being could understand or imagine. At the time he put forward this theory in response to the questions of those female students, and today this material still has great guiding significance and innovative significance for our scientists. If people who study physics were to see this knowledge, they would gain great inspiration: inside a particle there is a very fast vortex speed, and this internal vortex motion is much greater than the speed of the circular orbit.

What Are EE Units

Then he said a core passage:

The electromagnetic reality of feelings that emanates from each consciousness spontaneously forms electromagnetic energy units, that is, EE units.

As mentioned earlier: every thought, every feeling, every idea has an electromagnetic reality, and it is real and solid — not like what we humans think, that "thoughts are invisible and intangible." Every consciousness of yours emanates this electromagnetic reality, and this electromagnetic reality of feelings spontaneously forms electromagnetic energy units, that is, EE units. Note the word "spontaneously" — it forms automatically, and you do not need to deliberately do anything.

It is like how we humans radiate an aura: besides the breath exhaled from the mouth, when each person comes close, others can feel it. Blindfold you, close your eyes, and when a person comes near you, you can immediately sense their presence — they do not need to touch you or make any sound. That is a kind of aura.

He said:

EE units, then, are emanations of consciousness.

This is a declarative statement — EE units are an emanation naturally given off by consciousness, and you cannot stop them from being given off even if you want to.

The intensity of the thought or emotion determines the characteristics of the unit itself.

You must remember this.

When they reach a certain intensity, they are propelled into physical reality.

When your thoughts and feelings reach a certain intensity, the EE units given off are propelled into physical reality and begin to manifest. Whether or not this physical manifestation has occurred for us — it may show itself, or it may not — these EE units will still exist in the form of tiny physical particles, only we cannot sense them, and experiments cannot prove them.

What he says here is quite interesting:

They are, for example, beneath the range of physical matter, a pseudo-matter, so to speak.

This reminds me of dark matter. Scientists have now reached a conclusion: all the material world we see — atoms, molecules, planets, the sun, the earth — makes up only 4.9%¹¹ of the observable mass of the entire universe, less than 5%. The rest is composed of dark matter and dark energy. Regarding the existence of dark matter, we have never found direct evidence, but we have kept looking. This includes the Chinese-American physicist Samuel Ting¹², who has kept sending detectors into space, hoping to find evidence of dark matter's existence — what he is actually looking for is antimatter, believing that when matter and antimatter meet they produce a detectable particle, but he has never found it. And as for what properties dark matter itself actually has, scientists still do not know to this day.

Seth tells you: you can imagine these EE units spread all around us as a kind of particle, but we cannot observe it. You can call it pseudo-matter, false matter, or a kind of dark matter — matter invisible to you, but in essence it is still matter.

Faster-Than-Light Units

He said that some of these particles fall into faster-than-light groupings:

Some of these particles fall into faster-than-light groupings.

Most of what is in matter operates at speeds below the speed of light, which is why we can see it and perceive it as a form of matter. But some particles travel faster than light, and so they enter faster-than-light groupings. And within that framework -- that is, within the faster-than-light framework -- there is vitality that can be perceived:

Within that framework, there is vitality that can be perceived within that framework.

These faster-than-light particles naturally exist within their own kind of form, within their faster-than-light world and universe:

These units have many grades and a great many varieties... all existing beyond the reach of your perception.

However, lumping them all together in discussion will lead to misunderstanding:

But lumping them all together like this will lead to misunderstanding, because within all of these there is great order.

When we confuse faster-than-light particles with light-speed particles, treating them as responses of one thing at different speeds, misunderstanding arises. Why? Because we humans think that those invisible universes, those things beyond the three-dimensional world, simply do not exist. If you take something and say it exists in this universe at one moment and does not exist in this universe at another, that is hard for us to understand -- either it exists or it does not, so how can it exist at one moment and not at another? And yet that is exactly how it is.

You Are Not Entirely Unaware

Then Seth tries to explain. But honestly, I think this is really hard to understand. Let us see if we can follow his line of thought into it.

Although you do not experience them as mass... you are not entirely unaware of the existence of some of these units. You interpret some of them as events, as so-called illusions in dream events.

These particles moving faster than light form certain things in another universe—a universe with extremely dynamic forms of expression. But in our physical world we cannot observe them, yet we are not entirely unaware of them. For example, in dreams—some events in dreams, or other events, or so-called illusions—those are your interpretations of them. Sometimes certain ranges of these units are interpreted by you as movement through time:

And sometimes certain ranges of these units are interpreted by you as movement through time.

They all give off certain atmospheres or reactions:

They all give off certain atmospheres or reactions, and color the human events that you know.

Do they affect us? Yes, they do. Although they come from another time and space, as if not in our time and space, do not forget that everything in our time and space originates from other time-space origins—nonphysical time and space. So they color the world of our human reality. At this point you can understand: why is it said that all things in the world are conscious? Where does that come from? It comes from here.

Some of your own feelings are also propelled into a reality within this system.

Some of your own feelings are also propelled into that nonphysical system that we cannot perceive. Within that framework, they take on their own mass and shape—in dreams, do not those things also seem to have mass? It is the same.

How Waking Consciousness Works

Then he said something important:

In the creation and maintenance of your normal reality, you focus your everyday waking consciousness so intensely that it becomes efficient within the necessary range. The concepts and feelings you wish to materialize carry within themselves the mechanisms that will place them in the appropriate range, the range within the electromagnetic field necessary for physical development.

What he means is: our waking consciousness is required to be this focused, to handle matters in the three-dimensional world. We cannot say that waking consciousness sees everything as a multidimensional space-time -- if our waking consciousness could see all multidimensional space-time, with past, present, and future all mixed together, then you would be finished; you could not live in the three-dimensional world.

Since you belong to this three-dimensional world, you must follow the laws of this three-dimensional world. Your consciousness must clearly and distinctly judge whether the tiger is in front of you now or tomorrow, whether the danger is immediate or in the future. If past, present, and future were all jumbled together, if multiple space-time dimensions overlapped and presented themselves to you, you would not be able to distinguish the reality of the three-dimensional world from the reality of the multidimensional world -- that would make it impossible for you to survive in the three-dimensional world. The things you see would not even be in the three-dimensional world, yet they would seem so real.

So some people, in a certain instant, enter a kind of rift in space-time and experience that "ghost wall" phenomenon -- many people in the comments describe the strange experiences they have had in such a state. At that point you can understand: if your three-dimensional senses cannot stay focused within the three-dimensional range, life will create a great deal of confusion. That is why you can only attempt this kind of thing at certain times -- for example, when you are quiet, when you enter a state of meditation, a state of sitting practice, or when you are alone and still. You cannot experience this state while working, living, or walking around in your normal waking life; that would be extremely dangerous.

This is how the human body was designed from the start. In this designed state, those material things, those nonmaterial things, those things that exist across multiple dimensions of space and time, must present themselves to you in the form they should take in our three-dimensional world, so that you can identify and judge them with certainty and speed. In other words, you actually possess the ability to see their essence clearly, but in this state, that essence is simplified into a three-dimensional form so that you can recognize it.

Consciousness Can Move Faster Than Light

But he emphasized:

Your consciousness also has the equipment to create realities in other places.

Your consciousness can operate in the three-dimensional world, and it can also operate in other realities. In the previous chapter we already discussed this: your consciousness can go into spaces of however many depths and breadths to explore, and all of that is possible.

In certain dreams or out-of-body experiences, your own consciousness moves faster than the speed of light.

You can understand this, right? Under such circumstances, you can perceive certain other forms of mass or matter: massless forms, forms of negative mass, or concepts that are not the kind of mass we understand. Only when you are moving at faster-than-light speed can you sense those things.

For example, when you are out of body, you think of your aunt in America, and in that instant you may be right beside her. You are sleeping at home in Beijing, and in an instant you are in New York, crossing more than ten thousand kilometers, yet the time involved is just a split second. You can also instantly return to yet another place. This movement of consciousness far exceeds the speed of light, but you do not even notice it.

EE Units Are the Initial Form of Reality

Then he gave a definition:

It is equivalent to saying that EE units are in fact the initial form of reality.

Note that I misspoke -- reality does not refer to matter. EE units are the initial form of this world, and they may or may not be three-dimensional. He went on:

They automatically give birth to the seeds of growth.

EE units are seeds, suited to different environments: some appear within the physical framework and become our matter; others do not conform to its prerequisites at all. That is to say, EE units are the initial form of all realities -- including your dreams, which are also a kind of reality, and the other levels of your consciousness, which are also a kind of reality. In different realities, the initial form is always EE units. It is only in the physical world that, when the intensity of your thoughts and emotions reaches a certain level, they materialize into matter; in your dreams, they also materialize into the scenes in those dreams -- a kind of dream matter. So you need to understand that EE units are the realization of reality, the initial form of reality.

Reality Systems Composed of Faster-Than-Light Particles

Then he said another passage that is very hard to understand through language:

Now, there are certain reality systems composed of faster-than-light particles encircled by centers. The speed of these particles begins to slow down rhythmically toward the boundaries, in your terms, over great distances. Until in actuality the slower particles of the outer circle, to some extent, imprison the mass at the center. Although it moves much faster, it is nevertheless within a limited range.

What he is saying is this: in a reality system composed of faster-than-light particles, the speed at the edges will grow slower and slower. As the distance of motion grows farther and farther, after a very great distance, the speed at the edge of this faster-than-light universe is no longer that fast -- although it is not that fast, it will nevertheless display a state that is, relatively speaking, material. And at this time, the interior is still faster-than-light, but the exterior is no longer. So a single particle is itself both faster-than-light and not faster-than-light.

Why does this situation appear? Because when it goes to the outside, that slowed-down speed takes the slower particle at its center -- when it makes you manifest -- it does not mean that the middle of its interior is not faster-than-light. Its faster-than-light moving particles can still display a way of being below the speed of light so that you can see them, precisely because the outer, very slow, below-light-speed property imprisons the faster-than-light core at the center in the middle. So at the center of the particle there exists a faster-than-light universe, but it is surrounded and confined inside by the below-light-speed property of the particles on the outside.

This thing I can only say I can barely explain it. That is, why a particle has both faster-than-light internal motion and an external motion close to or below the speed of light, why they exist at the same time -- even today, using current scientific theory and scientific knowledge, it still cannot be explained. What he said in this passage means exactly this.

He said:

As you can now see, the behavior of such units forms the particular camouflage of any given system.

You can see: it can be faster-than-light, and it can also be below the speed of light, and it can display itself in all kinds of forms, so it can become the particular camouflage within any given system -- any material system, or non-material system.

At the same time, the outer activity effectively establishes the inner sense of identity and the outer boundaries.

The outer activity -- that is, the state that has slowed down, below the speed of light -- effectively imprisons the inner faster-than-light portion inside, establishing an inner sense of identity, and forms a boundary with the outside world.

Then he said, "Generally speaking, and simply put" -- you see, even he found it hard to say:

Generally speaking, and simply put, these are all various different appearances of what you think of as matter.

These are all what you consider to be matter -- matter has many layers; do not think that matter is just made up of tiny particles like grains of sand. It has many, many layers.

However, the same situation also applies to negative matter.

This is antimatter. It does not matter what name it is given; in any case, it is something you have not perceived. Within such systems, the levels of activity are likewise just as varied -- whether it is positive matter, the matter we can perceive, or antimatter, the levels of motion are also rich and varied, equally changeable.

Finally he said a very important conclusion:

But basically no system is closed, and energy flows freely from one to another.

Remember this sentence -- no system is closed.

He said earlier: no system is closed. The systems you think are closed are only closed in your understanding, but in fact all systems are open to one another, and energy flows freely from one to another, or rather, they interpenetrate one another.

It is only the camouflage structures that give the impression of being closed, and the laws of inertia do not apply. We think these systems are closed to one another, that there is no inertial motion, that energy will not spill over from this end to that end, that there is no intersection between two times and spaces. In fact, he said very early on that between different times and spaces there will be different leakages occurring within them.

It only appears to be a reality within your own framework.

It only appears to be a reality within your own framework, because of your own narrow focus. That is, these EE units only look like a reality within our framework, but in fact they are not, because of our narrow focus.

In other systems, the durability and relative stability of such matter vary considerably.

In our world, the durability of matter is very long, often lasting for years or for some length of time, or for a few hours, or for a few minutes and seconds. In other times and spaces, the durability and relative stability of matter vary enormously.

And the force of all such manifestations is determined by intensity.

It is by intensity that the force of manifestation is determined. The invisible EE units form your matter, representing the necessary and basic units out of which any material particle emerges.

He emphasized again: EE units are the necessary and basic units out of which any material particle emerges. That is to say, in all of our material world, the basic units of all particles come out of EE units.

They will not be perceived in concrete terms; you only see their results.

We can only see their results, that is, the results of becoming materialized manifestations. Ordinarily you cannot perceive them.

Since consciousness can travel faster than the speed of light, then when it is not imprisoned by the slower particles of the body, it can become aware of certain other realities.

He said consciousness travels faster than light, so it can become aware of the events in those faster-than-light universes. Because with things slower than light, you have no way of experiencing those things faster than light; but your consciousness can be faster than light, and when it is not limited by the material constraints of the body, this faster-than-light consciousness of yours can then sense the events in those faster-than-light universes.

Without training, however, consciousness would not know how to interpret what it perceives. The physical brain automatically converts thoughts and feelings into EE units of the appropriate range and intensity that the physical organs can use.

That is to say, your physical brain can only see EE units of a certain intensity or a certain range -- it can only see those of the appropriate range, the ones that can be used. Because even if you saw those other EE units, you could not use them, so the human brain has been trained to see only those EE units that can be used, of the appropriate range and intensity.

Then Rob added a phenomenon. He said that regarding faster-than-light effects, a newspaper reported the astonishing discovery of an astronaut who saw two parts of a quasar flying apart from each other at apparently ten times the speed of light¹³. Scientists have always been very surprised by faster-than-light events; he thought it could not happen in nature, but in essence he had no way of explaining those phenomena.

These EE units, then, are the psychic building blocks of matter.

He emphasized once again: EE units are the psychic building blocks of matter. You can understand this part on your own; we will not expand on it further -- expanding on it would again be a whole lot of rambling.

Next he asked the 23rd question: Has he had contact with any other person, or spoken through him, the way he does with you and Jane?

Seth said no. He said:

As I mentioned earlier, I have indeed contacted certain people at other levels of reality.

He has contacted certain people, but he has not communicated continuously, transmitting information, the way he does with Jane.

Then that female student asked a second question. The questions this female student asked were all very profound, completely different from the questions Seth and Rob asked. You can see what Rob and Jane were asking, and then you can see what this girl was asking. The question this girl asked was: Is experiencing inner vibrational touch similar to seeing a divine light?

Inner vibrational touch is the first of the inner senses. In The Seth Material -- actually it is a summary of the early sessions, it was the first book Jane published, in which she classified and summarized the 510 sessions Seth gave Jane from 1963 to 1970, and organized them into a book. In this book, in Chapter 19 I believe, she summarized the nine inner senses of human beings. And these nine inner senses, in fact, Seth had told her about them very early in the early sessions; in the latter half of Volume 1 and the first half of Volume 2, he described these nine inner senses one by one. And in the book The Seth Material, she placed them in Chapter 19 and went through them one by one. The first one is called inner vibrational touch.

Then the student asked: Is inner vibrational touch similar to the feeling of seeing a divine light? This divine light is a term from religion; we will not go into it deeply. Seth said no.

Inner vibrational touch is a far more personal experience, more like becoming part of what you perceive, rather than like seeing a divine light.

This means it is entirely personal, different for each person, not a unified experience. Rob began to make annotations. He rewrote the summary of the inner senses from Chapter 19 of The Seth Material, and the description below is a simplified account of inner vibrational touch.

He said that using this sense -- the first inner sense, inner vibrational touch -- an observer standing on an ordinary street would have this kind of experience: he would become whatever he chose within the range of his attention. He stands on a street and sees this street; this is everything within the range of his attention -- there are trees, flowers, grass, people. He can become them, directly feeling the feelings of the person passing by him, and he can also feel the feelings of the trees -- if he wants to feel the feelings of a certain tree, he can feel what that tree is like. If he wants to feel the feelings of a certain person, he becomes that person; an insect, he becomes the insect; a blade of grass, he becomes the blade of grass.

He will retain his own consciousness. He does not become a tree and then forget who he is; he still knows he is an observer, but he can overlap two consciousnesses together -- overlapping the consciousness of the tree with his own present consciousness as the observer. He can both know the sense of identity he maintains and feel the consciousness of that tree, or feel the feelings of a teenager riding by on a scooter on the road.

For example, in the way we now feel cold and heat to sense all kinds of sensations -- just as we can feel cold and heat, the coolness and warmth of the wind blowing on our bodies -- just as we feel our surrounding environment, in that way he feels that tree's feelings toward its surrounding environment.

This sense is like empathy or compassion, but far more vivid.

Here he simply gave an introduction to the first inner sense; this is very shallow and very general. Now you can roughly know what the inner senses feel like. And every person has nine inner senses; this is only the first one. When you have undergone training and opened up this inner sense, you will have that kind of empathy and compassion, and you can feel the feelings of all people -- of your surrounding environment. So you will understand why those who have attained the Way, those so-called masters, do not kill living things, why they do not cause harm -- they can feel the same feelings; how could they bear to do it? It is very simple: if a murderer could feel the psychological feelings of the person being killed, he certainly could not do it either. That is the principle. You cannot feel it because you do not have this kind of feeling. But for those who have undergone cultivation, this is naturally one of their basic perceptions, so they can feel that kind of thing in all things around them -- that is, the feeling of all things being one.

Question 24

Question 24: When you were about to come, when you, Seth, were about to transmit information, did Jane as an individual ever stop you?

Seth said:

There were a few times under special circumstances when I expressed my willingness to come, but in those situations Ruburt knew more than I did. This sometimes happened fairly early in our sessions, because Ruburt had some concerns about spontaneous trance states.

He was more worried back then—he felt that having a person, a stranger, enter your mind and speak through you was something that anyone would find hard to accept at first, and it was still worrying.

So after she understood that I was present, I followed whatever she decided at the time. On some occasions, when certain conditions were not very good, Ruburt usually had negative reactions to those conditions in that place, meaning the disturbances would disrupt him rather than me.

At times, Ruburt would feel that this channeling was not good for him, that it felt uncomfortable. Seth's meaning was that this would affect him but not me, but I would go along with him—if he did not want to come, then he would not come.

Question 25

Question 25, he asked Seth: Seth had once told him that there was a fragment personality of a dog still on Earth. Very early in the early sessions, around Session 12 or 13, he asked Seth: Does an entity have only one personality fragment on Earth? Seth said yes. Then he asked, is there only one personality fragment? Seth said, but — and I added one more thing — I have a dog fragment, and I placed it in a dog.

So at this point he asked: That dog — do you still have any specific fragment personality of the same kind on Earth?

Seth said not anymore.

My dog has gone, my dog has died.

Question 26: Are animals fragment personalities of humans

The next question is one that many people want to ask. Question 26: Are animals fragment personalities of humans? This is a question many people ask -- do cats and dogs have consciousness? Where does their consciousness come from? Do they reincarnate? Are they projections of certain fragments of human beings?

Seth says this is a good question.

You had better give me a moment, and I will explain this clearly.

In a certain manner of speaking, you are a fragment personality of your entity.

This is understandable, right -- we are fragment personalities of our souls. Because our soul has countless reincarnations, and we are only this one lifetime, we are one of its fragment personalities. This is understandable, and it also calls this a fragment personality of the personality.

Yet you consider yourself highly independent. Although you are a fragment personality, and you know you are a fragment personality, you are still highly independent, and this does not affect what you do.

You do not need to do anything by consulting with others, nor do you need to consult with your soul, or with your other fragment personalities -- none of this is necessary. You are highly independent.

And not a secondhand, cast-off thing.

It is not like something the soul did not want and threw away, no longer caring for it. You are still independent.

Therefore dogs and other animals are not merely the manifestations of strayed psychic energy belonging to the human species.

Remember that the key word here is "not merely" -- you must remember "not merely." "Not merely" means: these animals may in part be manifestations of strayed psychic energy belonging to humans. It will explain later why they are manifestations of strayed psyche -- they are not merely that, they have their own consciousness. Just as we humans are fragment personalities, but we humans are not manifestations of strayed psychic energy of our soul or entity -- no, we are not. It uses "not merely" -- you must remember that the word "not merely" is very crucial.

Animals have varying degrees of self-conscious awareness, indeed, just as humans do.

Animals have their own self-conscious awareness. Everyone knows that they know -- why? It is very simple: if you have kept pets, you know that when you call a kitten's or a puppy's name, it will quickly run to your side.

Yet their inner consciousness is as valid and as eternal as your own.

Their consciousness is the same as ours -- both valid and eternal. Consciousness, no matter what kind of consciousness, once created, once generated, will never disappear again.

There is no rule that prevents a personality, a person, from investing a portion of his own energy into an animal form.

He says there is no rule that restricts you from investing a portion of a person's energy into an animal's body. No one restricts you; you may do this.

But this is not a transmigration of the soul, and this you must remember.

You may project a portion of your energy into an animal, but this is not a transmigration of the soul. It does not mean that a person can reincarnate as an animal. This projection does not mean that this person has incarnated or reincarnated as an animal; he has merely projected a portion of his personality energy outward, projected it onto this animal.

He does mean that the personality energy sends a portion of its own energy into various forms.

Not only animal bodies -- you can send it to other places, into all sorts of various forms. But he tells you: this is not called the reincarnation of the soul, nor is it called the transmigration of the soul.

For example, perhaps reincarnation has ended for a particular person, but inwardly he has some slight fondness for the natural earth that he so often frequented in the past.

Perhaps this person has already ended his cycle of reincarnation and no longer needs to reincarnate. But he has some slight fondness for the natural earth -- this fondness is not that strong; if it were strong, he would reincarnate back again. He has a little fondness, but the fondness is not that strong -- it is slight. Therefore:

He may in such a way project a fragment of his consciousness into an animal. In so doing, he then experiences the earth in a way that is natural to that animal.

So a person is not this animal. After he does this, he is not this animal, nor has he invaded an animal's body -- it does not mean he has occupied the animal's body; it is not an occupation. He has merely added some of his energy to the energy the animal already has, mixing this vitality with the animal's own. This is superimposing the human consciousness onto the animal's existing consciousness, but not replacing it -- merely mixing them together.

This in no way means that all animals are such fragment personalities.

It does not mean that every animal has a human fragment personality within it -- no, only a small portion are like this.

Anyone who has a pet knows that the animal has its own individuality and characteristics.

Even among a litter of puppies or kittens, each kitten's personality is different, just as among several children in a family, each child's personality and characteristics are different -- it is the same.

And has its own unique way of perceiving the reality that is available to it.

Animals can sense their own reality, and they sense their reality in their own way -- their way of sensing reality is somewhat different from ours, but they use their own way. For example, a snake, a lizard, an ant, a turtle, a kitten, or a puppy -- they all sense physical reality in somewhat different ways.

Some animals gulp down experience, and through contact with friendly humans, their consciousness can be accelerated immeasurably, and their emotional involvement with life is greatly developed.

Why use the word "gulp down"? It means that much experience they do not understand, but they directly swallow it whole. Through contact with friendly humans, the development of their consciousness can be accelerated immeasurably.

A Scientist's Experiment

Speaking of this, I am reminded of an experiment done by a scientist that I saw the other day. This experiment was an observation¹⁴ by a scientist -- a biologist or some other kind of scientist, I am not quite sure. He had always wanted to observe the difference between human consciousness and animal consciousness. His idea was: if a chimpanzee were raised as a human from the moment of birth, what would that chimpanzee be like? That is, if the chimpanzee lived in the human world, would its consciousness be expanded?

And conversely, he looked at many cases of wolf children, cat children, bear children -- that is, what happens when a human child is adopted by wild animals under special conditions and what they ultimately become. In India there were two girls who were wolf children, raised by wolves¹⁵, and we have seen many stories like this before.

So at that point he wondered: why do children who grow up with animals not have those human characteristics? Why do they completely display animal nature? What is the mechanism and principle behind this? If humans are born with this ability, why can they not display their human side under any circumstances? Why is it that after living with animals for a long time, they display an animal side?

He wanted to conduct such an experiment, but no one would let him do it -- whose family would give him their child for this? Animals were easy to find, but a child was not. At that very moment, by coincidence, his wife became pregnant. You could say this scientist -- so-called scientists, basically most true scientists are in a half-crazed state -- wanted to use his own child for the experiment.

So he discussed it with his wife; she had to agree to this. His wife absolutely refused -- who could agree to have their child born and then put together with a chimpanzee? He worked on her for a very long time, throughout her entire pregnancy he kept working on her, repeatedly guaranteeing that absolutely no problem would occur, and that if any problem did arise he would immediately terminate the experiment. He also said, "You are also participating in this experiment; you will be with the child every day. If you find anything abnormal, we can stop at any time." He said this over and over. Perhaps his wife loved him too much, and in the end she finally agreed -- this couple truly sacrificed themselves for science.

As soon as the child was born, well, this man began his experiment. He had finally obtained a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. He took a newborn chimpanzee and raised it together with his own child¹⁶, as if his wife had given birth to twins -- feeding them together, giving it whatever the child ate, playing with it for as long as he played with the child, communicating with it and speaking to it in the same way, raising the chimpanzee just like a child.

The experiment had to be terminated after only about ten months. Why did he stop? After raising the chimpanzee together with the child for ten months, he discovered a very frightening phenomenon -- though one could not exactly call it frightening, it was more of a natural phenomenon -- the chimpanzee was becoming more and more like a human, displaying all human characteristics; while his child, strangely enough, was showing more and more animal-like qualities -- his child did not resemble a human child. A ten-month-old child should be a certain way, but instead the child displayed many essential animal-like behaviors. I will not point out the specific behaviors one by one.

At that point he had no choice but to terminate the experiment. He discovered: when humans live together with animals, humans pick up animal habits; and when animals enter human society, animals also learn human habits. That is, a child growing up in a human environment, when raised together with an animal of the same kind, will also have an attribute of returning to animal instinct -- not as people imagine, that a child raised in a human environment, even with an animal nearby, would not develop animal traits -- no, the child does develop animal traits. So we will not delve into the essence of this experiment. This man later wrote a paper about the results of the experiment.

Seth has already explained this issue very clearly here. He said earlier: when these animals are together with humans, they are gulping down these experiences. "Gulping down" means swallowing like a whale -- the emotions involved in their interactions with humans are extremely rich, far exceeding the experience of animals. He uses the word "gulp down" to mean that the richness of the experience exceeds what animals can comprehend, yet they accept it all -- whether they understand it or not, they accept it, they take in all the experience.

So these cats and dogs, through friendly contact with humans -- it must be friendly; you cannot beat them or scold them every day, that will not work -- through this kind of friendly human contact, the animal's consciousness is accelerated beyond measure, its consciousness is developing by leaps and bounds, and its emotional involvement with life is greatly developed.

The result that scientist discovered in his experiment -- Seth had already expounded this viewpoint here. The remarkable thing about Seth is precisely this -- he can always see the essence of things.

That chimpanzee also ended up in a very sad situation. After ten months, the chimpanzee was still a chimpanzee after all, not a human, so the scientist wanted to return it to the chimpanzee group. Because he had taken it from a mother chimpanzee right after it was born, he now wanted to put it back. This turned out to be a disaster -- the chimpanzee simply could not integrate into chimpanzee society. No matter how it stayed in that chimpanzee society, how it lived, how it interacted with them, it just could not fit in. In its beliefs, in its consciousness, it believed it was a human, that it was fundamentally different from animals, and so it could not integrate into the chimpanzee group.

This little chimpanzee died at around two years old, extremely depressed and melancholy, depressed every day. It is like putting a person together with animals -- if you tell an adult, "You are an animal, you are a chimpanzee, go live with chimpanzees every day" -- that person would be very depressed and miserable. So this chimpanzee died at around two years old. Chimpanzees can actually live for several decades. This is a typical experimental example -- it simply could not return to its original animal group.

This is a very interesting experiment. Here he is discussing whether animals have consciousness, and what kind of relationship exists between animal consciousness and human consciousness. Many of us keep pets, especially in America and European countries, where people's relationships with their pets are extremely close; many people in our country are the same, raising cats, dogs, and small pets as if they were their own children, sometimes even closer than their own children. That is this kind of mechanism.

The Mechanisms of Consciousness

The mechanisms of consciousness remain the same.

Consciousness is what we have been discussing in the previous two chapters -- Chapter Eighteen and Chapter Nineteen: consciousness has wave-like properties, has layers, can be explored, and is a tool that can be utilized. The mechanisms of consciousness are the same, whether that consciousness belongs to an animal or a human being. Consciousness itself does not change because it happens to be in an animal body or a human body; it does not change along with the physical body. Its mechanisms are the same.

No limits, therefore, are set upon the development of any individual consciousness, or upon the growth of any entity.

Be sure to remember, this is on an individual basis -- do not ask general, sweeping questions. Every consciousness must be inquired about in terms of its own individual nature. Each person's individual development is different, so the development of any individual consciousness, whether it is in an animal body or a human body, is in itself without any limits.

Even regardless of whether it is in a body or bodiless.

Whether it has form or is formless, these two kinds of consciousness are the same, and the mechanisms of their attributes do not change. That is why we spent so long studying Chapter Eighteen and Chapter Nineteen, to find the basic attributes of consciousness and the principles by which it works.

Consciousness finds its own range, its own level.

Consciousness can always find the range of its own existence and the level of its own existence.

A dog, then, is not limited to being a dog in other existences.

What does this sentence mean? A dog's consciousness, while it is in a dog's body, is a dog; but if this dog's consciousness is on other levels -- for example, on a nonphysical level, or in other spaces -- then it is not necessarily a dog. Because once it has no shape, once it has no physical body, it is simply a consciousness.

Before an entity can manipulate a complicated physical organism, a certain level of consciousness is necessary, a certain knowledge, a certain understanding of energy organization.

This passage says it again. When a consciousness entity wants to control a physical body -- for example, when reincarnating into the human world, being born into an infant's body, or being born into an animal's body, it is all the same -- no matter what kind of body it is, as long as it is this kind of complex organism, similar to mammals, if a consciousness wants to operate this organism, it needs to have been trained, to have become familiar with it, and it needs to possess a certain amount of knowledge, including an understanding of this energy organization, before it can operate these organisms.

It is like the Avatar we talk about -- when you enter the Avatar planet and put on an Avatar body, it is the same principle. It is like Iron Man putting on his iron armor -- you have to train. Look at Iron Man at the beginning: he just crashed straight into the ceiling, crashing here and crashing there. It is roughly the same idea.

So what he wants to say is this: when a consciousness wants to operate a physical body, it possesses a certain level of knowledge and understanding of energy. In other words, he is answering another question: can an animal reincarnate as a human being? Because apparently this question exists -- in Buddhism there is the concept of the six realms of reincarnation, which says that the animal realm and the human realm can reincarnate back and forth. These are some views within Buddhism. Actually, from what is said here you can understand: no, humans and animals do not reincarnate into each other.

There are many, many reasons. The main reason is this: once you have reached the higher level of being human, there is no need to go back to a lower level. Like the example I just gave, once you have evolved into a human being, if you insisted on living among a group of gorillas, then your consciousness would not be developing but regressing. From the perspective of the soul, from the perspective of the progress of consciousness, it would not choose this kind of regressive evolutionary path. It will only leap upward to higher levels; it will not say, I will go back to the past -- just as a college graduate cannot go back to kindergarten. The vivid example I gave means the same thing.

And conversely, a lower-level consciousness cannot operate a complex body. For example, the consciousness of a cell, the consciousness of a virus, a single-celled organism, or the consciousness of a simple frog, coming to control a human body -- it cannot control it. It does not have the corresponding knowledge or the corresponding ability; it cannot control this human body. Now you understand -- it is not the way you imagined.

Consciousness, as you know, has a strong tendency to maintain individuality, while at the same time joining in some kind of gestalt.

Consciousness has a very strong tendency to maintain its own uniqueness; it does not want to be uniform -- every consciousness has a tendency toward its own uniqueness. But at the same time, it must return to a wholeness. The so-called gestalt is a wholeness. It has both its uniqueness and its individuality -- every consciousness has its own uniqueness -- but it will return to its wholeness. For example, when we reincarnate and return to the level of our soul, this consciousness merges once again with the entire soul.

An animal consciousness after death may form such a gestalt with other forms of consciousness, in which abilities are pooled.

When we humans reincarnate and after death return to an overall entity, does the same happen after animals die? Yes, it does. Because there is an animal gestalt here. After each animal's individuality, each consciousness's uniqueness, returns to a wholeness, its abilities are all pooled together.

And this kind of joint cooperation makes possible, for example, the alteration of a species.

How does a species evolve? It is like this: as the environment changes, some animals develop a certain ability. When this ability is only individual, after the animal dies, some of its offspring possess the related ability. Once it reaches a certain degree, this ability becomes one that every individual of that species possesses. Along with these changes in the environment and these particular changes, this kind of thing is called the alteration of a species. The alteration of a species happens precisely because the individuality of consciousness returns to an overall gestalt and brings all of its abilities back with it. That is the process.

In these and other cases, however, the innate individuality is not lost, but retains an indelible stamp.

This point must be emphasized: when this consciousness returns to the gestalt, its innate characteristics of consciousness are not lost, and no individuality is lost. It is like many people say: since after I die in this reincarnation I will return to the state of an overall entity, return to the larger whole self, then what meaning does my experience in this life have? I am just someone running errands for others, just a person collecting experiences; I have no real significance. He is emphasizing once again here: these are all indelible. Every one of your lives, every experience, every event, is an indelible stamp. It is not that once you reach a higher level of consciousness, those earlier ones no longer exist or are erased -- no, they are forever indelible.

It is in the nature of consciousness to change, and therefore identity must change.

He emphasizes once again: it is in the nature of consciousness to change; this is an attribute of consciousness. When your consciousness changes, then your identity changes along with it.

But one identity does not blot out another, but builds upon it.

One identity covering over another, erasing it -- that is not what happens. When a change in consciousness brings about a change in identity, a new identity is built upon the old identity.

Each successive step is retained, not discarded.

You must understand that every new step of progress, every birth of a new identity, is built upon the old identity, and it is not that a new identity is established after erasing the old one. It is an iterative development, step by step, so every old identity is preserved.

In this interrelationship, each step, each process, or each identity, is immeasurably enriched by the added perceptions of the others.

Every old identity is immeasurably enriched by the new perceptions brought by a new identity. These newly perceived things not only do not erase the old identity, they also greatly enrich some of the old identity's previous perceptions. It is not erasure, but development.

As mentioned earlier, thoughts contain their own electromagnetic reality.

Thoughts have their electromagnetic reality, their electromagnetic nature. Whether or not you can perceive them, they all have shape.

With your every thought, then, every idea, that is, every thought, every belief, every mental image, you send out shapes and images from yourself that are quite legitimate reality to the beings within the reality systems into which they are propelled.

You send out certain images from your own thoughts and mental images, called belief images. The images you send out are, to the beings in that reality space, quite legitimate and quite effective reality -- that is, they truly exist, just as if those beings were seeing this thing of yours.

In the same way, personalities from other systems, since such events do not originate from your system, you do not understand their importance.

This process is mutual -- we can send our belief images into other times and spaces, so can personalities from other times and spaces also send energy into our world? Of course they can. If you can send it out, others can send it over. Since these events do not originate from our time and space, but are belief images sent over from other times and spaces, we do not know where they come from, nor do we know their importance -- you do not even know how they got here.

What he means is that some things that happen in our time and space may have origins we do not know. In other words, this also hints at the question he was addressing about animal consciousness and animal souls -- for example, a dog living in our three-dimensional world may have attached to it a small portion of a fragment personality of Seth, and this fragment personality is not in this three-dimensional world but has come in from another time and space. But how would the person raising this dog know? How would he know that the boss behind this dog is actually Seth? He would still hit the dog when he hits the dog, still scold the dog when he scolds the dog. If it were a stray dog, it might also live a very miserable life. So what he means is: you do not know how it got here either. There is such a process between reality spaces.

The content of this session is extremely important, covering many core issues: one is the units that make up matter in the world -- EE units -- which he elaborated on once again in detail; then he also discussed the consciousness of animals themselves and the question of their souls.

A Letter Before the Session and Seth's Perception

There is a little interlude at the beginning of this session. Before the session, there was a letter written to Jane, sent on March 6, 1971, by a Mrs. R. She said her son had gone missing on June 28, 1970, and had been missing for almost half a year. She wrote to Jane to see whether she could get some reply for her through Seth. So you can see, basically they all treated Seth as a channeler, like a Gypsy doing psychic fortune-telling. That was how they were using Seth.

Then Seth said, "Now begin your program," which was the start of the joking around, meaning, let's see what you have prepared for me. Rob asked whether they could first address Mrs. R's letter. He said, as Seth, that is, as Jane, because at this time Seth was in her, she brought the letter over. Seth was looking at the letter through Jane's eyes, and after reading it, he folded the letter and held it in his hand.

Session 582

Because this boy had gone missing, Seth used his extrasensory means to look at the boy. He said the boy had been to several places:

There was a short stay in a hospital, and there seemed to be something wrong with his lungs.

He believed he had been to Detroit, and also to Florida, in a small town near one beginning with P. In his heart he missed California very much. The number 36, he did not know what it meant. He had a job, but in a factory, a rather dark environment, with a series of things that I believe were certainly machines, and there were also large windows that had been treated, large windows that let the sunlight in but not very brightly, that is, the windows may have had something like blinds added to them, something like partitions. Either that, or the place was half buried underground.

He said the name George was connected with him, but he could not say clearly whether it was a friend of his. He said I believe he also sent a telegram, either to someone, or sent the telegram to his mother. He did not know to whom the telegram was sent, but he could see that he had sent a telegram. He said this person's disappearance should be connected with two young women, but the mother would hear news of him. He said this is all I know at present.

Through this matter we can probably also understand that those in so-called higher-dimensional space do not know everything either. It is not as you imagine, that they are omnipotent and omniscient. Because he had never seen this person, nor had he seen the person who wrote the letter; with only one letter and this tiny bit of information, the information he could see was also limited.

Then he said he would type up a copy of this content and send it to the person who wrote the letter. During the more than twenty years in which they transmitted this material, books were being published one after another, and readers kept writing letters asking for help. Some problems were very serious, such as this kind of missing person case, and also personal psychological problems, or very severe suicidal tendencies, and so on. The two of them were also very conscientious, and basically made sure that every letter was answered. Although the reply time was very long and slow, because their workload was also very heavy, as long as they had the time and energy, they would answer these letters.

He said that no matter how long Seth's reply was, whether five pages or ten pages, he would type it up and immediately send a copy to the person who wrote the letter. Then he said we would ask in the letter for a reply to verify, in fact he was checking whether the information Seth gave was correct. But in this case, he did not receive a reply, and did not hear any news.

What Is the Theory of Evolution Really About

Then Rob raised the twenty-seventh question: Let us discuss whether evolution is a fact or something that has been distorted.

The question of evolution has always been a controversial one among human scientists, mainly in the West, where Darwin's theory of evolution has dominated for many years. Darwin first wrote a book called On the Origin of Species¹⁷ On the Origin of Species¹⁷. Based on his own observations, he believed that species evolved from simple organisms all the way to complex ones, from single-celled to multi-celled organisms. But this theory of evolution has faced two major sources of resistance in the current Western media.

The first source of resistance comes from religion. In countries where Christianity is prevalent, people believe that the theory of evolution must be wrong, that the world was created by God, so how could there be any such thing as evolution. The church dislikes the theory of evolution intensely, yet it still made its way into textbooks. Although the United States is a predominantly Christian country, it is after all a country where church and state are separate. Apart from church schools, in all normal schools, whether public or private, as long as they are not church schools, you are not allowed to promote anything related to any religion. So the theory of evolution also entered school textbooks in its early days.

But in recent decades, the theory of evolution has been proven wrong by many current scientists. Why has it been proven wrong? Because no transitional form can be found. You say that one species evolved from another species, but archaeologists can only find the previous species and the next species he talks about, and cannot find the intermediate species between the two. For example, the main claim of the theory of evolution is that life came from the ocean to the land, but we have never been able to find this evolutionary trajectory; it is incomplete, or incomplete in all the key places. Only some tiny pieces of evidence can be found, such as how a certain bird might evolve and change into something, but the large-scale evolution cannot be found. The most central point is the process of evolution from ape to human, for which very direct evidence has never been found. What has been found is either ape or human, and the so-called "ape-man" that is both ape and human has not been fully proven to have any direct relationship with modern humans.

The current situation is that, at least in American textbooks, in elementary, middle, or high school textbooks, the theory of evolution has already been removed. I suspect that this is due to pressure from the Christian church as well as pressure from the scientific community, with both sides working together to remove it.

Actually, back in the 1970s, people were not as concerned about the theory of evolution as they are now. Nowadays people do not really care much about the theory of evolution anymore. Many people say, how come I did not know? I still think that survival of the fittest is the law of evolution, and we still think that way. That is our basic concept, and we have been influenced by it since childhood. There is no way around it. Just like our understanding of physics and this world, our basic knowledge remains at the middle school level. If you do not study seriously or systematically afterward, your entire worldview, values, and view of the world all remain at the knowledge level of middle school. Physics has developed for so many years, but your understanding of physics remains limited to Newton's first law, the laws of thermodynamics, and other classical physics from hundreds of years ago. You are not very familiar with quantum field theory, quantum mechanics, and other modern physics. Our understanding is all like this, and that is perfectly normal.

Rob simply wanted to ask Seth what he thought about the theory of evolution. He did not say that the theory of evolution was wrong; he said it had been distorted. Then eight days later, in the ESP class, Seth said the following about Darwin's theory of evolution, and Rob excerpted it into this session as an answer to the previous question:

Darwin spent his remaining years trying to prove the theory of evolution, but it has no real validity. It has validity only within a very narrow point of view.

Why? Because our consciousness is indeed the result of the evolution of form -- no, he said it the other way around. Seth stated this core point right at the beginning:

Because our consciousness is indeed the evolution of form -- that is, our consciousness determines our form, and the evolution of consciousness can cause the form to evolve, but the form is not the evolution of consciousness.

Seth has a pattern when answering questions: the first few sentences he says are usually an overview, or a summation of the viewpoint, very much like how we write a paper, and then he expands on it afterward. What he means is that all the biological forms we see are determined by consciousness. The progress of consciousness or the change of consciousness can cause the form to change, but the change of form does not cause the evolution of consciousness.

We humans currently believe that our consciousness and thoughts today all began with single-celled organisms, from large polymer molecules to protein molecules, evolving bit by bit -- that is, carbon-based life forms. All life on Earth is carbon-based -- starting from the simplest cell, to increasingly complex life forms, and then simple consciousness emerged. When it came to mammals like humans, a more advanced consciousness appeared. Darwin believed that the reason humans became what they are now is because of evolution, and that such an advanced consciousness also evolved. Seth rejected this view right at the start: consciousness is not the result of the evolution of form, or of physical or material evolution. On the contrary, consciousness came first, and then form came. This view is basically subversive, completely different from all mainstream science.

He said:

All consciousness does indeed exist at once.

So it did not evolve and develop in that way, not as we say, from single-celled organisms developing into advanced complex organisms and only finally producing consciousness. He said:

The theory of evolution is determined by when you enter the picture, and what you choose to observe, and which part of the drama you decide to observe.

He described Darwin's theory of evolution as something like this: when did you begin observing this picture, what did you want to observe, how long was this time span, and which part of the drama did you decide to observe. The development of history is multi-threaded; whichever part you observe, therefore his perspective is very narrow. Within a certain range and scale of time, it has a certain reasonableness, but in essence it is wrong.

He said that actually the opposite is closer to the truth:

The evolved consciousness has cast itself into many different patterns, raining down upon reality like rain.

These patterns are like molds, like the molds we use to make mooncakes or pastries. He said:

Consciousness did not come from atoms and molecules that were accidentally scattered throughout the universe, or scattered throughout many universes.

The arrival of consciousness was not because lifeless matter suddenly leaped up into activity and song, and began to sing and dance and run with joy. What he means is that our consciousness did not come from lifeless carbon atoms, hydrogen atoms, oxygen atoms, nitrogen atoms, and the combination of these atoms into molecules and then into life. Consciousness did not suddenly pop out of these lifeless things and then become a beautiful melody of singing and dancing. He wants to tell you that these absolutely did not pop out of the lifeless.

Before each consciousness takes form, before it becomes an image and becomes concrete, at that level of consciousness it is like a mold, like a shadow -- like those hazy shadows we see in movies -- and only then does it use its energy to make itself solid, concrete, and material. It is like a mold of an electromagnetic image.

Let me give an example to make this more vivid. Every person or every animal, such as a horse, a puppy, or a flower, before it forms this material body, first has an electromagnetic image, and then it fills this mold step by step. It is not a fixed image; it is a developing image. Just like a little snail growing from small to large, how does it know what it is going to grow into? How does its shell know how big it will become? How does it know that this shell will be exactly the right size for it to carry? A snail constantly sheds its shell; its shell is not this big from the beginning, but grows bit by bit. In the process of a small snail growing into a large snail, it is like filling in a mold.

Each of us, from a child growing into an adult, what we will look like is like a predetermined mold: what you look like at one year old, at two years old, at three years old. That electromagnetic model is like the shadowy electromagnetic form in the movie Ghost. Then because your beliefs and your consciousness are strong enough, just like the process of how matter is produced that he described in the previous session, the process by which this electromagnetic energy forms matter and forms the basic theory of our three-dimensional world is the same -- according to your beliefs and according to the intensity of your emotions, it gradually takes shape. That is how it happens, not the other way around: first there is a physical body, and then thoughts slowly arise within the body, and thoughts finally become consciousness.

He said no, it is reversed: first there is consciousness, then there is the physical body, and then consciousness "casts" itself into it. He used the word "cast," which is also very well chosen. He said:

Consciousness then casts itself into many different patterns, like rain.

Why does he say "like rain"? It is like countless atoms and molecules filling the image of this mold, like countless raindrops falling in with a patter. Suppose you have a very large toy-shaped bucket in your backyard, shaped like a little bear. You leave it there, and it is empty. If it rains now, the raindrops will slowly fill the bucket, and once it is full, the shape of the water inside the bucket will be the shape of a little bear. The formation of our material body is very much like this: the raindrops are like atoms, molecules, and cells that make up our final physical body. It is the same principle. Actually, it itself follows cell division and cell expansion, but how do cells divide? According to what pattern do they divide and what do they grow into? That model already existed long before.

He said:

Consciousness existed first, then evolved the form, and then from within it, it blossomed and revealed itself.

Consciousness first had an image of itself -- that nonphysical image -- and then it made this nonphysical image concrete and solid, manifesting a specific image, and then placed itself into it. In the process of the union of consciousness and the physical body, consciousness is allowed to blossom within it, to become aware of its own existence in the union with the physical body, and then to manifest itself.

He said:

If you all had really paid attention to what I have said time and again about the simultaneity of time and existence, then you should already know that the theory of evolution is just as much a beautiful story as the biblical story of creation.

Why does he bring up the Bible here? Because it is the exact opposite of the Bible. The Bible says that one day God said let there be light and there was light, let there be heaven and earth and plants and animals, and on the last day he created man. The theory of evolution tells another version of the story: from lifeless matter, living things were born; from single-celled to multi-celled; from the ocean all the way to the land; from reptiles all the way to mammals. He said that both of these are like a beautiful fairy tale book, and neither is correct. He said:

Both are quite convenient, and both are ways of telling a story, both for the sake of convenience, simply so that you can understand. And both seem reasonable within their own systems. But in the larger view, they cannot be reality.

Then he said:

Any form of matter, no matter how powerful it is, cannot evolve itself into consciousness.

This must be emphasized: no matter what other matter you add, it is still useless. This is a core point. Many people worry about whether artificial intelligence robots will one day replace humans. Robots have become more and more powerful, and in the future they will be just like humans, even smarter than humans, surpassing humanity. Here Seth gives you a definite answer: impossible. This kind of lifeless material thing, no matter how powerful it is, cannot evolve itself into consciousness. So the biggest problem with artificial intelligence robots right now is that scientists have used all kinds of algorithms but still cannot solve one core problem -- making the machine have self-consciousness. They can only simulate this thing in various ways, making it seem as if it has consciousness. For example, the Siri and Xiaoai classmates we use, we all know that they are actually more of a simulation and do not have self-consciousness themselves.

He said:

Without consciousness, there would be no matter drifting around in the universe, waiting for another ingredient to give it reality, consciousness, existence, or the song of life.

If it has no consciousness, none of these can come into being.

At this point a student in the ESP class asked: Does every tiny bit of matter already have consciousness? He said:

Indeed, and consciousness comes first. Consciousness comes first, you are right, quite right, thank you for asking that question.

Why Seth Repeats Himself

At the time, Seth said this:

At the risk of repeating myself again, let me state that basically time as you know it does not exist, and all creation is simultaneous.

Many people feel Seth is long-winded, repeating the same issue over and over. The same goes for various masters, spiritual transmissions, the Buddha, Buddhism, various scriptures -- they all seem to talk in a particularly repetitive way, going over the same issue again and again. If you have read Buddhist sutras, you know that some issues are discussed repeatedly. Setting aside the internal logic of the sutras themselves -- for example, how they use the two truths, conventional truth and ultimate truth, to argue in an upward spiral -- much of the time the significance of this repetition is mainly this: the belief system we have absorbed from decades of traditional, worldly conditioning cannot be changed overnight. That is the biggest problem.

One moment we seem to understand, we have a sudden realization, an awakening, a flash of clarity. But as we get further and further away from the knowledge system in time, we slowly return to ordinary daily life, and we go back to using decades of habit to look at the world again. It is not that once I understand a piece of knowledge, I will apply it in time. A person will not apply it. He continues to follow his previous patterns and apply his previous knowledge. This is a normal fixed mindset and mental pattern of human beings. So these people have to repeat themselves over and over, precisely to keep reinforcing and pulling you back from those decades of wrong ideas.

In other words, those wrong ideas of yours were also formed through hundreds, thousands, even tens of thousands of reinforcements before they became today's beliefs. If a correct piece of knowledge cannot give you enough signal strength and enough repetition, and you understand it after hearing it only once, then think about it -- would that not be a mismatched amount of information in your brain? A wrong piece of information has already been instilled in you for decades, repeated countless times, confirmed by different people, different mouths, different voices, different channels all delivering the same message. And today you are seeing a completely different idea that overturns your entire knowledge system and material framework. If there is not enough strong information, or if it is only told to you once, you simply cannot quickly accept it or make it your own. That is why Seth says here, "I risk repeating myself."

He said:

That should have answered your question.

He used this question to answer how evolution actually works. But such an answer certainly left everyone unsatisfied, which is why Rob added the content from the ESP class here. Because if Seth's answer had been left as it was, most people would not have known what he was trying to say.

Rob said, "I thought of that." He said that if during the first break he had told Jane about the fact that time is actually simultaneous -- meaning, I knew you would answer this way, because you have emphasized it many times already. He said:

This knowledge about the fact of time is confusing when people ask a certain kind of question. The knowledge has answered half the question, but we want the remaining half of the question to be considered as well. I will explain in detail.

Seth continued to elaborate on the issue of simultaneity:

All the ages of the earth, in your terms, both past and present, exist, and the future ages exist as well.

Now, this "now" is the present, and it should be written as a capitalized Now. He said:

In this time, there are some life forms that are developing, but they will not physically appear until you reach your future. Do you understand?

In this present moment, many life forms are in the process of developing, but they will not appear in material form until we reach a specific future. When we arrive at that future, we will be able to see them.

Let me give a vivid example. When a person is about to reincarnate and come over, he has long since determined what time he will come and how, and perhaps at that point his parents have not even been born yet. But that life is already developing. In the state between two lives, it is already a life, and it has already decided when it will come. So to us, that life does not exist at all. But when I reach a certain point in time, it will be born into this world like a little baby -- when you reach your future, it will be born. But before it is born, those life forms that are still developing and will only appear in the future -- their present existence is just as certain as the present existence of dinosaurs. We know dinosaurs do not exist now, and he says "just as dinosaurs exist now" -- none of us understand this. Actually, what he means is that if you understand that time is simultaneous, you can understand this issue.

He said:

You only choose to focus your attention on one extremely specific point in the coordinates of space and time, accepting them as the present reality at those coordinates, and shutting yourself off from all other realities.

He specifically pointed out:

Complex life forms and life patterns are not the result of earlier, simpler forms. Broadly speaking, they all exist simultaneously.

Just as I said earlier, a human being cannot have evolved from a frog. It is that simple. They exist simultaneously. On the other hand:

A more complex organization of consciousness is required to form and enter into a more complex material structure, and to endow it with life.

This may seem hard to understand, but to put it simply: consciousness itself has its simplicity and complexity. The consciousness of a blade of grass is probably much simpler than the consciousness of a cat, and the consciousness of a snail is certainly much simpler than that of a human being. In this case, you can see the differences in consciousness itself. A simple organization of consciousness cannot form a complex living body -- as I just said, all forms are formed by consciousness. First there is a mold, and then the consciousness actualizes it, materializes it, and then merges itself into it. So you could not build such a complex living body. How could such a simple consciousness constitute such a complex living body? You could not do it.

He said:

All structures are formed by consciousness.

Our atoms, molecules, the cells in our bodies, our organs, the various systems of the body -- all these organizations, the entire precision instrument that is the human body, are all formed by consciousness. Then he said:

In your terms, a fragment personality is a consciousness that is less developed than your own.

That is, a fragment that we project outward, a fragment of our consciousness, is of course not as developed as the consciousness of our whole self.

He said:

The living portions of nature are all the result of your own creativity, the projections and fragments of your own energy.

All the living parts of the natural world are the result of our own creativity. They are formed by projecting our own energy outward, or by projecting a fragment of our own energy outward. So why is it said that humans are the most advanced of all living things? Because of human complexity -- humans are the most complex life forms on this planet, and therefore they can create other life forms that are simpler than themselves. I am just helping you understand it this way.

He said:

The energy that goes out from All That Is to you, and then out from you, forms its own image just as it forms your own image.

Who is "it"? It is the energy you project outward -- the living things in nature, those things that have life. That is "it." To put it simply, the energy we receive from All That Is, because we are a part of it, is then projected outward again, and that is what generates the world and all things around us. Does that make it easier to understand?

He said:

Since you are not aware of the future, and do not understand that life spreads in all directions, then you must assume that present forms are necessarily based on past forms.

We do not know what the future will be like, and we cannot foresee the future, but we can see the present and the past. And we do not understand that life itself is a divergence, a spreading in all directions -- it is not single-threaded, not going from a simple life form to a slightly more advanced one, then more advanced, then branching out like a tree structure. He does not understand that life actually develops in parallel and simultaneously, and that all things in the world came into being all at once. Then how was this world born? In the book Dreams, "Evolution," and Value Fulfillment, he gives a detailed introduction. When you do not understand this, you will of course assume that present forms evolved from some past form. That is a natural way of thinking.

But he said:

You ignore the evidence that does not support this viewpoint... truly ignore it.

What is "this viewpoint"? It is the fixed idea that "present patterns, present forms, must be based on past forms." We ignore the theories that oppose this viewpoint and the evidence they mention. He said he is not referring to you personally, not referring to Joseph; he means that all human beings do this.

He said:

In other words, there is no such thing as single-line development.

As a species, the fragment components we project outward of course also enrich our physical reality. These projected fragment components enrich our material reality, because without maintaining such a good balance and such good cooperation, this particular environment of yours could not exist. If the natural world were not formed by the projection of our energy, if it were not formed by our energy, then it would not be possible for it to maintain such a good balance. Without such a good balance and this kind of cooperative relationship in nature, the environment we call the natural world could not exist.

He said:

I have often told you that your idea of yourselves is so limited that you really do yourselves a great disservice.

We think we are just slightly better than cats and dogs, that we are just a slightly higher animal, just little crawling creatures on the earth. He says you look down on yourselves far too much. He said:

Your sense of identity, your sense of identity as human beings, your sense of identity, freedom, rights, and love, can be immeasurably strengthened.

What is our sense of identity? We are the creators. That is our sense of identity. He said:

If you want to understand what you are, you are not bounded by your skin, but continue outward, into the seemingly impersonal or alien material environment.

If you want to understand who you are, you have to expand yourself out from the wrapping of your skin, outward into your surrounding environment, the flowers, plants, trees, living animals, and even into the inanimate environment -- they are all your outward projections, and they are all part of you. You are a walking universe, and you stand at the center of this universe.

When you want to understand who you are, you have to keep expanding outward, and outward still.

In biology, it is easy to understand why we are one with all things. He said:

Physically speaking, you are a part of everything on the earth.

From a material standpoint, the material components that make up the cells of our bodies are not essentially different from the cells that make up cats, dogs, snakes, and birds. You are all made of the same elements. We breathe the same air. How do you know that the air you are breathing in this breath was not circulating inside some animal's body just a few hours ago? You cannot hold on to the air you breathe in and say, this is me, I am filled with this air, I will not let it go. You cannot do that. You must exchange and communicate with nature. You must let the air enter your body and then leave again. Then he says you will quickly discover, if you observe carefully, that you are actually not that independent. You are a part of nature. You are a part of this world.

He said:

You are biologically and chemically connected with the earth you know, but since it is also naturally formed by the psychic energy projected outward from yourself, and since you even have a psychic interaction with the four seasons and the changing of the seasons, then this self must be understood within a far larger framework.

If we have resonance, interaction, and even psychic interaction with heaven and earth, with all things, and with the seasons, then the question of who we are should be understood within a larger background and framework, rather than limiting who we are to within our skin.

He said:

Such a framework would allow you to share the life experiences of many other forms, to follow the patterns of energy and emotion that you only faintly understand, and to feel the consciousness of a world in which you have your own independent part.

He said this passage very well. "Follow the patterns of energy and emotion that you only faintly understand" -- what patterns? Your emotion combined with energy can generate the world around you. The outward projection of your psychic energy is the world around you. After you project it, you then interact and exchange with them, and then you have new feelings, and the new feelings are projected outward again. That thing is also changing, and your feelings are also constantly changing. This is a process of continuous interaction and circulation. He says that when you go and follow such a pattern of emotion and energy, you can then feel the consciousness of a world -- you expand your own entity consciousness to the level of a world consciousness, where all things are you and you are all things. But you might say, if I am one with the world, does my individual part disappear? Am I submerged in this vast cosmic consciousness? He says no. Within this, you still have your own independent part, the part that you call yourself.

That is all for this issue. That is all for the discussion of evolution. What does it mean? You and the natural world are one. How could there be any such thing as evolution? Whether from the material level, or from the spiritual perspective, or from the essence of the universe, all these things came into being simultaneously, and all of them were generated by you. So if you look at it from this angle, you will no longer consider evolution. It will no longer be a question. So when they asked Seth whether evolution is a fact or a distorted picture, Seth's final conclusion was: there is actually no need to ask this question anymore, because you are already all things, and you are still asking how all things came to be -- is that not a rather interesting thing?

Portraits of the Speakers

Now let us look at question 28. Rob asked: Have you painted any portraits of Speakers?

Seth said he had, for example one of a man named Moses, and also a portrait of Seth himself (meaning Seth's own portrait). There was also one of a man named Tom from the ESP class, and so on, and recently a portrait of a woman, and also a portrait of a "blue man." He said all of these were Speakers.

Rob asked whether Seth had painted any Speakers, and Seth said, "You have painted these" -- but he did not include Rob, because Rob had never painted himself at all. Seth said, "Since I have not painted any self-portraits, I would not be included in that list in any case," which is quite normal. But Seth did indeed forget to mention the portrait Rob had painted of Jane -- he had painted a portrait of Jane once, and Jane is also a Speaker, yet in Seth's answer just now he did not mention Jane.

There is a very big issue here. Actually, at this level, Seth was flattering and elevating Rob and Jane by saying that the two of them were Speakers. In truth, Seth is a little old man with a very strong human touch, and here he really did have a certain flattering quality, just like the way people chat with one another. In one sense, Jane and Rob are both Speakers, but in another sense, neither of them really counts. They can only be regarded as people who relay, people who transmit, conduits, narrators, or repeaters. If we say the two of them are Speakers, that is not quite right. It would be correct to say that Seth is a Speaker. But to say that Jane is also a Speaker is a bit of a stretch. So on this question, Seth inadvertently let the cat out of the bag -- he did not include Jane in there, because it was an instinctive, intuitive response, a relatively objective answer to the question, and so he did not mention her.

And in Chapter 17, when Rob asked Seth whether Jane was a Speaker (whether Ruburt was a Speaker), Seth said yes, he was a Speaker. We can imagine that in that context, if he had said Jane was not, the blow to Jane would actually have been very great. At that time the transmission had only just begun six years earlier, and Jane was actually still hesitating about her interest in this matter and about the whole thing itself. She had always felt that this kind of channeling was somewhat not presentable, and her belief had never been very firm. If this kind of not-presentable thing could bring the two of them a good income -- for example, publishing books could bring income -- but at that time the books had only just begun to be published, and the results had not yet looked very good. Under that premise, if Seth had further dealt her a blow by saying, "You are not a Speaker, you are just a mouthpiece, I say something and you repeat it," that would actually have been a very big blow to Jane. So in that situation, he said, yes, you are. And then right after that he immediately added a supplementary remark -- you remember that Seth, afraid the two of them would misunderstand, immediately added, "There are thousands upon thousands of Speakers in this world." Then Rob and Jane felt relieved. And Rob could also feel at the time, in the tone of the exchange he could also feel that Seth was flattering the two of them, and he said at the time as well, "He was obviously flattering us."

The two of them had always wanted to exist as Speakers, and so they wanted to be acknowledged. Actually, you know, a true Speaker does not need acknowledgment from anyone. Whether it is Seth, the Buddha, or Jesus, there is no need to seek acknowledgment from others. Whether he is a Speaker or not, he himself knows very clearly. But ordinary people like Rob and Jane need affirmation from others, need Seth to affirm them. So this question actually exposes the telltale sign.

We will stop here on this question. Later Rob talked about the matter of painting -- he would often paint figures that appeared in his mind. We will not say more about that; we can just skip over it.

The Dead Sea Scrolls

Seth asked Rob, "Do you want to bring up the question about the Dead Sea Scrolls now?" This was actually a question from some readers. Because in The Seth Material, Seth had mentioned the matter of a third Christ. In Western society, whenever you talk about anything related to Christ, especially a new Christ, the Second Coming, the Messiah — people are extremely interested in any news of these comings. Everyone is hoping for a Christ to come again to save humanity. People always have a desire to be saved. People never quite believe that they themselves are their own saviors; they always fantasize about a higher civilization or a higher god coming to save them. This is a kind of human instinct, a manifestation of inertia. So many people asked about the Dead Sea Scrolls — that is, readers wrote in with questions.

Seth did not answer. He said:

I will leave that until the chapter in which we discuss religion.

The chapter on religion is Chapter 21. What he called discussing religion was actually all about Christianity. The story he unfolded using Christianity actually alluded to and encompassed other religions as well, but he spoke mainly through Christianity. He said that in that chapter he would answer your other related questions.

Many of us do not know what the Dead Sea Scrolls are. Let us look at the introduction on Wikipedia. It says the Dead Sea Scrolls, also called the Dead Sea Scriptures, the Dead Sea Book Scrolls, or the Dead Sea Documents — any of these names works. These were a batch of books dating roughly from 408 BCE to 318 CE¹⁸, but the overall dating of the Dead Sea Scrolls is roughly from the third or fourth century BCE up to around 70 BCE. The Common Era is based on the birth of Jesus, so this was actually the period just before the birth of Christ, during the era of Judaism at that time.

What is their main content? They are the oldest surviving Hebrew Bible manuscripts found so far¹⁹. Apart from the Book of Esther, the entire content of the Old Testament can be found among the Dead Sea Scrolls. Before the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, the earliest Bible manuscript humanity could find dated from the ninth century CE²⁰ — that is, more than nine hundred years after Jesus died — a handwritten copy. So people were skeptical about the reliability of the Bible from that period, suspecting that it had been altered many times; I am referring to the Old Testament. It was only after the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered that they realized the ninth-century copy was almost identical to the material from the third century BCE — that is, from more than a thousand years earlier. In some passages only three letters differed, and the word formed by those three letters did not even affect the meaning of the sentence, so the accuracy was already extremely high.

The whole collection was written in Hebrew and some other languages, and was discovered around 1947 near the Dead Sea at a place called Qumran²¹. Qumran is also the region where Jesus was born. The scrolls were mainly copied onto parchment or papyrus. You can see what the Dead Sea Scrolls look like: the writing goes from right to left. This is an excerpt from the Psalms, copied by people around 2,300 to 2,400 years ago.

Why bring up the Dead Sea Scrolls? At the time, there was a young shepherd boy tending his sheep, and one sheep ran into a cave and would not come out. The cave was dark and deep, and the boy did not dare go in, so he threw stones inside to try to drive the sheep out. By accident he heard a crash — he had smashed a clay jar. After breaking the jar, he found there was something else inside. He mustered his courage and went in to look, and discovered these ancient scrolls. Then over the following ten years, from 1947 onward, a total of ten years, eleven caves were discovered, along with clay jars and forty thousand scroll fragments²². Then in 2017, archaeologists discovered a twelfth cave²³, which was already quite recent.

Why do we need to discuss these scrolls? Because in the era when Rob and Jane were communicating with Seth — 1971 — very few people in the entire world knew what was inside them. After the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, there were always eight or nine scholars doing the puzzle work. They worked at it for ten years without producing much of anything, and then it was delayed for another thirty years. They were extremely slow, did not make things public, and would not let anyone see the contents. It was just those eight or nine scholars picking away at it little by little; when one died, another was brought in to fill the spot. And among those eight or nine people, only one had no religious faith at all; the rest were all believers in Christianity or Catholicism. But what the Dead Sea Scrolls contain is a great deal of material from Judaism and from the Old Testament, and much of it — you could not exactly say it contradicted Christianity, but in any case it was unfavorable to their church. So people suspected that the Vatican church was working behind the scenes to keep the Dead Sea Scrolls from being seen by the world.

It dragged on for more than thirty years. It was not until 1984 that the content was first made public in an article²⁴, and even then it was not the whole thing — only a portion was published for the first time. The full text was only 150 lines, and they published 6 lines. You can imagine: the Dead Sea Scrolls had already been discovered for thirty years, and the pressure from the scientific community and public opinion was enormous. Because the shock of this historical discovery to the entire Western world and the whole world was so powerful, yet the researchers kept delaying publication, so all kinds of conspiracy theories and rumors were rampant.

They still did not make it public. In the 1990s, under pressure, the Israeli government expanded the number of scholars working on it to twenty²⁵. But with more than forty thousand scrolls, most of them like fragments — most of them are like fragments that need to be pieced together — how could ten or twenty people complete this puzzle? Let alone study it, even completing the puzzle was a difficult task. So it kept being delayed.

Then in 1991 something truly remarkable happened. A Biblical Archaeology Society was established in the United States in 1985²⁶, and in 1991 this society formally went into operation. Through all kinds of news, all kinds of rumors, and people involved in the research who smuggled out photographs, no matter the method, they published the entire Dead Sea Scrolls — all the content was made public: photographs of forty thousand scrolls. Later, the Huntington Library in Los Angeles, a very large library, also released some of the photographs, allowing all scholars to study them permanently. In San Marino, California — a place less than twenty minutes from where I am now — there is the Huntington Library, which made public archival photographs of the Dead Sea Scrolls collected from four sources²⁷. From that time on, scholars around the world could study the Dead Sea Scrolls.

More recently, Google used electronic scanning. Beginning in 2011, Google cooperated with the Israel Antiquities Authority, using multispectral imaging technology developed by NASA²⁸, to digitize the entire Dead Sea Scrolls into a digital edition, which was gradually made public on its website for people all over the world to consult and translate.

At the time, it was perfectly natural for Rob and Jane to be interested in the Dead Sea Scrolls, because it was only 1971 and no one knew what was inside them. They wanted to hear what Seth had to say. Today we are not going to study the Old Testament, nor study the contents of the Dead Sea Scrolls. If you are interested, you can explore that on your own.

Time and Consciousness

The next question is also a very crucial one. Rob said that in Session 491 on August 14, 1968 (Seth Speaks begins with Session 511, so twenty sessions earlier—that is, still in the early sessions), Seth said one sentence there: minutes and hours also have their own consciousness. He did not explain it in detail. Seth said, so now do you want me to explain it in detail? Rob said he did not know either; he guessed the question might be too complicated for you to give us a concise answer.

Time itself has consciousness—when you say time does not exist, that is still acceptable; through some analysis, through your own insight on some level, you may gradually come to accept that view. But I want to tell you, the time you perceive has consciousness; time itself is endowed with consciousness. That may again exceed the limit of your thinking.

What did Seth say? He said, "Wait for us a moment"—meaning he wanted to think about how to explain this. The pause was not long, about several dozen seconds. He continued, this passage is actually a little difficult, but not impossible to understand. He said:

The time that you perceive is part of other events that intrude into your own system, often interpreted as movement in space, or as something that divides events. If it were not in space, then it would be impossible to define it without using the idea of time.

In the first sentence he gives a definition of time. This time is not something in our system; it is part of another system that intrudes into our system. It is as though time is not something in our three-dimensional world, but something from another dimension, another reality world, and after it arrives in our three-dimensional world, we perceive it as a thing. So Seth often says, "Time is like weight"; sometimes he equates time with matter, saying time has weight, which means time is a material thing. He also says, "An atom equals a microsecond," which is also stressing the uncertainty of matter. We will leave aside his other questions and see how he explains it.

He says in our three-dimensional world we understand time as movement in space, and this is real. You may remember in Conversations with God, God says this world created all things, and then all things first have this and then that—there is distance and separation between them, and moving from here to there takes time. That is the root cause of the emergence of time. If there were no such interval, if this time were not needed, then there would be no concept of space; therefore space and time must be one. Einstein discovered the continuum nature of space-time long ago.

Then we also treat time as something that separates events—there needs to be an interval between one event and the next, and that interval is time.

Actually, from Chinese you can understand it better; from English it is harder to understand. In English, time is just "time," and the word itself has no deep meaning. But in ancient Chinese, the meaning of "shijian" (time) is very deep. "Shi" is a phono-semantic compound character. On one side is the "si" from "simiao" (temple)—it is the sound element, telling you the character is pronounced "shi"—but the prototype of this character was "ri," meaning the sun. Later, in simplified characters, the "si" was changed to a "cun," but in traditional characters it is still the "si" of "simiao." From this "shi" we know it is related to the movement of the sun: only with the four seasons does time emerge; only with sunrise and sunset can humans sense time. The interval between each sunrise and sunset was divided into small segments, into twelve double-hours, and each double-hour was further divided into quarter-hours and smaller marks, divided very finely. If you have watched The Longest Day in Chang'an²⁹ The Longest Day in Chang'an²⁹, you will know how tightly that time was measured. So ancient people studied time very carefully, but basically it was all related to the day, to the sun.

In other words, let us take another example: what if there were no sun in this world? If you were sent into the vast universe, with no sky, no earth, no sun, no moon, no sunrise and no sunset, would the concept of time not change for you? Would its meaning not change? Or say you are on a space station now, seeing sixty sunrises and sixty sunsets every day—would time not also feel rather chaotic to you? So for humans, time only has a specific meaning here on this earth, in this three-dimensional world.

What is "jian" then? "Jian" means space, a gap. In its ancient written form it was moonlight coming through a crack in a door—inside it was not "ri" (sun) but "yue" (moon). In oracle bone script, the middle of "jian" was the character for "moon," the idea of moonlight passing through. At that time, "jian" represented interval, gap. So the "jian" in "shijian" also represents this separation between events. That is our understanding in the three-dimensional world.

He says "often interpreted as," so this is our interpretation of it. But its essence is the actualization in our three-dimensional world of an event from another kind of time. He says:

Actually, what separates events is not time, but your perceptive abilities.

We are able to separate events; what separates this event from that event is not time, but our perceptual capacity. Because we perceive events one at a time, because we can only perceive one event at a time, we perceive time in this way: it develops sequentially. On the other hand:

What you see as time is an organization of experience in the psyche.

This sentence is very abstract. The time we see is a way in which our psyche organizes experience, organizes our experience of events. If we organize it sequentially, we call it time. If instead of organizing it sequentially we organize it in parallel, then time is simultaneous. If we could sense a thousand events happening at once, each perceived clearly and experienced distinctly, then those thousand events would be simultaneous for us. But human beings do not have this ability; we can only take one event at a time, perceiving one event after another. Therefore the way these events are organized—the way our sensory system organizes and sums up sensations—is time. If you sum it up linearly, it is linear time; if you sum it up in parallel, it is parallel time; if you sum it up backward, would time not flow backward?

He says:

What appears to be the beginning and end of an event, the birth and death that appear, are only other dimensions of experience, just as height, width, and weight are.

You think beginning and end, birth and death—these are also a kind of dimension. He says:

On the other hand, when an end point is a special experience, or if you prefer, when you call it part of a lifetime, you appear to be growing toward that end point.

His meaning is: when you make the end point into a special experience, when you consider the end point different from the other events in the process, with its own special significance, and that this matter ends there—if you organize events in this way, then the things experienced earlier all seem to move in the direction of that end point, and this feeling is what makes you think time exists.

For example, you think that you will certainly die one day in the future; this is an outcome you believe in, and you believe it unshakably; it is also a fact. Under this belief, you will certainly believe that this event truly exists, because you are moving toward that result, because death is an important special event among the events of your life. But what if you do not think so? What if you regard this death as the beginning of the next life? What if you do not regard death as an end point? If you think that the reincarnation Seth teaches is normal—die and come again, die and come again—and that these occur simultaneously, then your concept of time is completely overturned.

This part is indeed a little difficult to understand, but not so difficult that it cannot be understood. Let us continue.

Now, the multidimensional reality we are discussing, the whole self and the entity or soul, can never be completely materialized in three-dimensional form.

We are discussing a multidimensional reality, and this soul, or call it the entity, the whole self—whatever you call it—can never be completely concretized in a three-dimensional way; it can only be partially concretized. But:

Part of it, however, can be projected into that dimension.

A multidimensional reality cannot be displayed in full, but it can be partially projected into our present three-dimensional world, stretching across so many years in time and occupying so much space, and so on. A multidimensional event itself has no time and no space; it is one of many events happening simultaneously. But when it enters our three-dimensional world, it becomes an event or an object that takes so many years and occupies such a large space.

For example, when we look at a present house, we think it was built in the three-dimensional world, but perhaps this house has another layout and another form in the multidimensional world. When it comes into our three-dimensional world, it is a three-dimensional house—say, built in 1998 and demolished and rebuilt in 2056. During the period from 1998 to 2056, this house exists continuously, occupying this space for such a long time; that is why we have concepts of time and space.

He says:

This entity regards this whole matter, this whole human affair and its time factor, as another characteristic or dimension.

Our soul regards the whole "relationship between people and events"—that is, how we manage and organize our events, how we experience our events—this time factor and our age—as what? Another characteristic or another dimension. From the soul's perspective, it does not regard this as time; it is another characteristic, another dimension.

He says:

However, this relationship between person and event is not cut off; the relationship still exists, only its larger reality cannot be displayed within three dimensions.

That is, the relationship between the person and events that we experience is not broken because of the way it is displayed in the three-dimensional world—the manner of time and space. This relationship between people and events in the multidimensional world has always existed. It simply cannot be fully displayed in the three-dimensional world.

On the other hand:

It is also composed of atoms and molecules within ranges of intensity of matter that you cannot perceive, above or below those ranges of material intensity, and all of these have consciousness in their own way.

When one of our multidimensional events can only be partially displayed in three dimensions, in being displayed it becomes a material thing. But we know that behind this matter there exists a nonphysical form—behind the material appearance there is its nonphysical core, whether it is its template, its belief system, or its construction by consciousness—none of these are things of the three-dimensional world. Those things are above, below, within, or beyond the molecules and atoms of our matter. Be sure to remember that all of these have consciousness "in their own way." The consciousness of matter is different from human consciousness; you cannot reason by analogy and say, does this nail feel pain? The nail's consciousness is the nail's consciousness, completely different from human consciousness; it has its own way.

He says it is indeed not easy to understand; he hopes everyone can understand that the thing beneath your material plane is itself conscious. Therefore:

In broader terms, minutes and seconds do not exist either. But in the reality behind time, or behind what you regard as time, in that reality, the events outside that time are composed of units that have their own consciousness; they form what you see as time, just as atoms and molecules form what you see as space.

From a broad perspective, from a higher level, time does not exist, and minutes and seconds do not exist either. But in the reality behind what we in our three-dimensional space-time regard as time—that world one dimension higher than our three-dimensional world—the events there themselves have consciousness. We can only say that at the level one dimension higher than our three-dimensional world, they have consciousness. If you look from an even higher level, none of this has meaning; if time has no meaning, then it has no consciousness. So here he is presenting a dialectical concept. That consciousness itself, the consciousness in four-dimensional space, forms what we see as time in three-dimensional space, just as atoms and molecules form what we see as space—the same principle.

He says:

These units move faster than the speed of light.

It refers to those realities behind our material world, such as EE units, electromagnetic energy units. They enter our three-dimensional world, but have never concretized; they do not materialize into matter, but they are also an excellent source of energy, because they move faster than light and have enormous energy. In other systems they receive different interpretations—these things in the nonphysical universe that move faster than light have different interpretations in their own system; but when they enter our material world, they make us feel the existence of time and space. Time and space are produced in this way—by a higher, larger, more formless reality system behind them intruding into our three-dimensional world, forming the concepts of time and space in our three-dimensional world. But in their own system, they have their own interpretation. When they come to our side, they are no longer called time or space; in that world of theirs, it may be like length, width, and height—a dimensional property of objects—and when it reaches us it becomes time or space.

Recommended Further Reading

In this session we also talked about the Dead Sea Scrolls, and the introduction to them discusses Hebrew and the present-day Israelis, how they came to be, their characteristics, including how the Bible came to be, how Christianity came to be, and so on. Regarding this topic, I recommend everyone read a book called The Hai'aohua Prophecy³⁰ The Hai'aohua Prophecy³⁰. You can search for this book online, and if you cannot find it, I can put it in our discussion group. It was written in the eighties and the manuscript was finished in the nineties. You can just read it like a novel, treat it as science fiction, and there is no need to interpret it, it is very simple. Because the author himself was not a scientist; he was simply taken by an extraterrestrial to live on another planet for nine days, and then he wrote down what he brought back. This book introduces a great deal about Earth's civilization, its evolution, and its history from the perspective of extraterrestrials. Let us not first worry about how credible it is or to what degree it is true or false; looking at some of the introductions to the evolution and progress of Earth's civilization in it, I think it is a very good supplementary material. This was recommended by one of our readers, and after reading it I thought it was very good. As a reference for the earlier chapters where we discussed the evolution of human civilization, that is, when we talked about the four Earth civilizations, this can serve as a reference. This novel is really fun, it is completely a novel, and you can read it as a novel, or you can also treat it as an account of the progress of ancient human civilization. Many of the viewpoints later in it are very interesting.

Out-of-Body Experience: An Effortless Projection

Let's first look at Session 583. At the beginning of this session, Rob recorded one of his own out-of-body states, that is, astral projection. There is nothing difficult here, so I will simply go through it briefly, so that friends who have no experience with out-of-body projection can get a rough sense of it from this description.

However, the feeling of out-of-body projection is completely different for each person; everyone has their own particular case. But the first thing is, when you have this kind of out-of-body experience, the first thing is you must not panic, you must not be afraid. Very often, people experiencing it for the first time will feel fear, because they discover that they have come out of their body. Rob had had out-of-body experiences before, but in the previous several times he was very afraid each time; this time was the only time he had no fear at all.

What Rob recorded was something from yesterday. Yesterday at 11:30 in the morning, he was dozing, that is, in a half-asleep, half-awake state. Before going to sleep, he had suggested to himself that in the morning he would write down the dreams he had, but he had not mentioned any suggestion about astral projection. He slept rather restlessly, because the ESP class was still being held. One very interesting characteristic is that very often, out-of-body experiences mostly happen in a half-asleep, half-awake state, rather than in a deeply asleep state. You can tell from his description that while the ESP class was going on he woke up several times, and finally he vaguely heard the class members driving away from the house, leaving from the neighboring parking lot, and then he fell asleep. After the students left, Jane did not go to bed until 12:45 in the afternoon.

Rob said that the next thing he knew, he was flying in their dark bathroom. He was in a bodiless state, yet he was not troubled at all. The bathroom was in the center of their apartment, with the living room on one side and the bedroom and studio on the other, so the bathroom was in the middle of the house. In order to keep the cat Willy from getting on the bed at night, they put the cat in the living room and closed the door on the living room side. Now he found himself hovering in front of that door, unable to pass through it.

Logically speaking, the spirit body can pass through any door or wall, but he simply could not pass through. He did not feel panic or fear. His spirit body's eyes could see; he could see that door. To his right there was some faint light coming in through a narrow open window; the door facing the bedroom was in deep shadow. He knew he was in front of the door facing the living room. Although in the bedroom behind him, his body was still lying asleep next to Jane. He did not worry about it—he did not worry about his physical body.

At first he did not realize that he was projecting. He did not think of commanding himself to pass through the door and enter the living room. Slowly, he came to know that he was outside his body.

And as for this very comfortable, weightless state, I do not remember at all the actual leaving of my body and moving into the bathroom. In this rather unusual projection of his, for the first time there was no element of fear present. Yet he believed that the ordinary conscious concept that a door cannot be penetrated blocked him. Because of such a belief, the door blocked him.

Session 583

After being blocked by the door and finding no way through, he slept a while longer. When I became conscious again -- although it was a few minutes later -- he found himself just floating above the physical body lying on the bed. He happened to be sleeping flat on his back, and he saw himself lying flat, arms at his sides. His spirit body was in roughly the same position, just six inches above -- one inch is about 2.5 centimeters, so six inches is a bit over ten centimeters. His condition was remarkably stable, and he felt very comfortable. He said:

I felt very awake, knew what I was doing, and felt completely free and weightless.

He heard himself snoring, but did not pay much attention to it. He knew he was not dreaming -- this is crucial, because out-of-body experience and dreaming are completely different sensations. He even remembered reading several times that when a person projects astrally, the state is different from the state of dreaming. He said he could now verify this directly, and he was very happy -- the articles he had read before said that astral projection and dreaming are completely different sensations, and now he could prove it, so he was very pleased.

This time he had a different kind of illusion. He particularly noticed his legs, suspended above the legs of the physical body. He said:

I began to pay special attention to my legs... I gleefully played with them, lifting them up and down, enjoying the wonderful feeling of their freedom and lightness.

He knew that the legs of his physical body could not move that freely. He said the legs of his spirit body felt quite like rubber, elastic like rubber, so light and springy. And from his face-down position, he saw that their color was very pale, and from the knees down they were semi-transparent. It was strange, because he was clearly lying flat on his back and should not have been able to see his own legs from above, yet he could look down at them from above. After leaving the body, you will find that your body is not entirely transparent -- only part of it is transparent. For example, only his legs below the knees were semi-transparent, while the legs above the knees looked just like normal legs.

He said that even though his projection seemed so stable, he began to think of giving himself a great opportunity. He did not feel afraid, only full of confidence. He thought, this is a wonderful time to do something -- to go do something while out of the body, this is a great moment for adventure. He told himself he was willing to try anything, to go see some other reality, to see what other times and spaces looked like. He was very curious and eager for adventure, because he had no fear at this point.

He said he thought of bursting through the door into the living room, and going out to stroll along the street in front of the house. All this time Jane had been lying beside him; while his soul floated above his body, Jane had been lying beside him sleeping. Jane later said that when she got into bed at 12:45, Rob was already sound asleep, snoring loudly.

At this point his attention began to shift focus. For the first time he really heard his own snoring, and was astonished at how loud the sound coming from his physical body was:

When I am awake, I could not possibly imitate that sound.

He began to consciously and deliberately attempt to start moving, to walk away from his body, but he did not succeed. His effort to move away did not pull him back from the state of projection. Many people say that in the spirit-body state, if you try too hard or get too excited you will snap back, but he did not snap back either. He was still straining, trying to make the spirit body leave the body and go farther away, but he was still floating around in the same place -- actually he was not flying either, just drifting around about six inches above the body.

Then he had an idea, and this idea was quite interesting. He wanted to use the sound of his snoring as a propulsive force, to launch himself into another reality in one leap, leaving the physical body far behind on the bed. He deliberately began to snore even louder -- that is, his awake spirit body commanded his physical body to snore with all its might, using the sound waves of the snoring as a propulsive force to push himself out. He said:

I wanted to build a huge sound-power system and turn it into propulsion, although I did not know how this could work.

But strangely enough, he quite liked the feeling of lying not too far above his physical body, and the fact that he could use the latter to make sounds. Here he hinted at a dual consciousness -- he had intuitive awareness of both bodies. That is to say, he could command the sleeping physical body to snore, and he also knew that it was he himself giving the command.

He said that either he heard the volume of his snoring actually increase, or he had concentrated his focus more intensely -- he was not sure which. In any case, his idea did not work, and he still did not know whether he would actually succeed in taking off.

Just at that moment, Jane said to him, "Dear, you are snoring, turn over." This kind of thing probably happened often in their life together -- when Rob's snoring made Jane impatient, Jane would often say, turn over, stop snoring. He clearly heard what she said, immediately stopped snoring, but he did not move or turn over. He did not remember returning to his body. Finally he gently nudged Jane, and it took some effort to collect himself, and then he told her what had just happened. Jane said she thought he still sounded as if he were in a trance state -- that is, the state right after returning from an out-of-body experience, as if that dazed, otherworldly quality was still there.

He said he felt as though he might go out of body again, so while Jane lay quietly beside him, he tried again and again, wanting to project out of body once more, but he did not succeed. When he consciously wanted to leave the body, he could not get out. Although the very comfortable atmosphere surrounding the whole episode still lingered quite distinctly. This projection, though small, was so easy and natural that it made him wonder why it was not something that happened often. He knew there were far more possibilities than he had been able to accomplish, that wonderful possibilities lay just beyond his ability at that moment -- if only he could break through that barrier. He felt no panic at all, and did not feel that silver cord of the spirit body at all, and then he fell asleep.

Many people say during out-of-body experiences that there is an invisible cord, like a silver ribbon, connecting you to the physical body. But not everyone has this -- each person's personality and individual sensations are different.

Seth's Commentary: Out-of-Body Experience Is Not Something Strange

Finally Rob fell asleep. He wanted to ask Seth two questions: first, if projection of the spirit is so pleasant, and not only pleasant but also has so much potential, why haven't Westerners known more about these abilities? Second, why haven't Westerners cultivated them and made use of them?

Seth began to come through. He first said congratulations, congratulating Rob on having had an out-of-body experience. The following words were addressed to Rob's experience from the day before:

You chose that time to try that experiment, and you could say you were well prepared for any contingency.

Why was he well prepared for any contingency? Because you knew that if you happened to get frightened, Ruburt would be coming to sleep soon. You went to bed at eleven-thirty first, and you knew that doing this experiment at that time carried little risk. If anything went wrong, if you went somewhere else and couldn't get back, Ruburt would be coming back to sleep at that time and might help you, might wake you up. So you didn't need to worry. But you were already prepared to try again, choosing a slow and easy method. A quiet environment, a comfortable environment could also make it easier. Therefore, before you really did anything too risky, you needed to become more familiar with that feeling, so that you could go to farther places and explore more of the unknown world. So he suggested that Rob find another time and try again.

Rob asked, did I try doing this before Jane came to bed? Seth said no. Rob went to bed at eleven-thirty, drowsily hearing all kinds of sounds, but his real out-of-body experience happened after Jane came to bed. He may have felt the timing was different, thinking he had gone out of body before Jane came to bed, but he couldn't remember clearly, which was why he asked Seth. Seth's answer was, you began trying before she came, but you didn't succeed until she came to sleep. A person's sense of time outside the body is quite different from inside the body — if you have an out-of-body experience in the future, you should understand that the feeling of time is different.

You know that once you have had a successful experience, you will be much freer, so you chose the best situation, which was having Jane nearby. You did have the possibility of leaving the apartment; you could have. However, the snoring also served as a signal to Ruburt — you knew he would wake you up. That was the original motivation for the snoring this time. You thought you were clear in your mind that if you didn't like the experiment, it would be terminated. But at the same time, you felt quite happy, and you decided to use that noise as a driving force. But then Ruburt made the usual response to the snoring and said, turn over.

Seth said, you should now find that you remember several experiences of this kind. By the time he was typing this, it was already April 25th, and in the meantime he had kept trying to see if there was another out-of-body experience, but all attempts had come to nothing. On another occasion he had a rather minor out-of-body experience, and then almost two weeks later, there followed a series of incomplete projections, or dreams containing distorted elements of the phenomenon, or a kind of out-of-body dream — he couldn't tell them apart either. It was strange, like the feeling of aftershocks following an earthquake.

Then Seth answered Rob's question about Westerners:

Westerners have chosen to direct their energies outward, greatly neglecting the inner world.

Even in the religious sphere, such experiences have been automatically resisted since childhood. In your society, going out of body has no social benefit whatsoever; on the contrary, there are many taboos against it. Seth said something similar elsewhere in the early sessions: if you two had an Eastern background, you would understand my material better, because the West is too extroverted. They only believe what they can see with their own eyes. This has reinforced them in such a way that attempts at inner cultivation and meditation are essentially quite unacceptable to mainstream society. When you say you can leave your body, in Western society people think you're being spooky; they don't consider it some kind of marvelous ability. On the contrary, whether in religion or in other areas, there are many negative things said about out-of-body experiences.

Actually, our modern society also has this orientation. People who seek inward do not gain social recognition. On the contrary, those who seek outward — going to make money, to gain fame and visibility, even becoming an internet celebrity — all receive social recognition. But those who truly pursue the essence of what it means to be human are not recognized by mainstream society; people think they're being spooky, that they have too much time on their hands. This requires a process, and there's no rushing it.

Of course, this is the collective choice of all the people involved in that civilization — Western civilization. Before everyone reaches the middle way and understanding, there may be some balance. What is the middle way? It means achieving a balance between attending to the outer world and the inner world — not attending only to the inner world while ignoring the outer world, which would also be abnormal; nor attending only to the outer world. Before reaching the middle way and understanding, there is still some balance, still some room for survival.

Some people choose to reincarnate into an outwardly oriented society to compensate for the extremely introspective lives they have lived in the past. Some people spent their previous lives living a monastic, contemplative existence, extremely introspective, quite unconcerned with and unskilled at manipulating matter. In this life, they may incarnate into an outwardly seeking society as compensation. People must learn that both inner reality and outer reality have to be understood, and then constructively utilized, before you can be considered complete. Seeking only inward won't do, and being entirely outward like the Western world won't do either.

Of course, whether you remember it or not, projection frequently occurs in the sleep state. When there is some reason to recall them, or when some process or obvious achievement is involved — as in societies where the use of dream projection is considered highly advantageous — then you will remember those projections. In another kind of society, one that is favorable to dream projection, people will remember these things.

He gave an example:

If you are presently experiencing a life in which you have chosen to place special emphasis on the travel aspect of the human body... then through flying dreams and vague memories, you may be motivated to work toward the invention of, say, airplanes or rockets. But if you truly understood the fact that your own consciousness can indeed travel outside the body, then the drive toward the invention of vehicles for transporting the human body would not be so strong.

What he means is that if you truly understood that your spirit can leave the body and fly freely anywhere, then your drive to invent airplanes and rockets wouldn't be strong — you already have the ability yourself; you can fly wherever you want, so why invent airplanes? His implied meaning is, why are airplane and rocket inventions more advanced in Western society? It's precisely because they have always been projecting outward. So when they project outward, they have these flying dreams and vague memories, and these dreams and memories motivate them to invent rockets and airplanes. If you knew you could travel freely at any time, you wouldn't have the drive to invent them.

The self has no boundaries

Next Rob asked a question. He said, in 1968 you said that some personalities are simultaneously part of several entities. This was said in the early sessions. According to Rob's understanding and our general understanding, one entity corresponds to one fragment personality, or corresponds to one lifetime of a person's reincarnation -- this is a one-to-one correspondence. But what Seth said in that passage left Rob somewhat confused; he did not know which was actually correct.

Seth came to explain:

The self has no boundaries, and its development has no hindrances.

The self, that is, the personality of your reincarnation in this lifetime, has no boundaries, and nothing can limit it. A personality may initially be part of a certain entity -- "initially" is in quotation marks, because according to our human time it is initial, but in actuality time is simultaneous, and there is no process of before and after. This personality independently develops quite different interests, abilities, and potentials. It can rely on itself to walk a solitary path, completely different from the interests and hobbies of that entity, walking a brand-new path of its own. Or conversely, it can attach itself to, or be attracted to, another like-minded "entity" over there -- this "entity" is also in quotation marks. Then the original connection will not be severed, but a new connection is established.

Therefore, at this moment the personality has unlimited possibilities and developmental potential; it is not rigidly restricted, saying that you must be a certain way. Many people ask: has my life path already been chosen, and can I only walk according to this path? No, never. The operating power is always in your hands. You can even go and become part of another entity, attaching yourself to, or being attracted to, an entity more like-minded with your present state -- one with whom you can get along better. But the connection with your old entity is not severed; a new connection is established. That is to say, you can establish two connections and communicate with two souls at the same time.

Beyond the Inner Senses

Then Seth answered question 46. In Chapter Nineteen of the psychic information, Rob said you gave a list of the inner senses -- this has been mentioned many times, there are nine inner senses in all. He asked, are there others you haven't told me about yet? Seth said, indeed there are, but they belong to experiences that are potential in nature and ordinarily not encountered within your particular system. Because they are potential in nature, related to experiences that would not be encountered in your system -- in our three-dimensional world, here on earth -- we don't come across them, so he didn't introduce those senses either.

He explained:

Almost any cell has the ability to grow into any given organ.

Before any cell differentiates, it can become any part of your body, any organ. They have the ability to develop into sensory organs -- our visual cells, olfactory cells, auditory cells are all sensory cells. But if that cell becomes an elbow or a knee, then its ability to develop into a sensory cell will not be developed. But the potential is there, just not brought into play.

This applies not only within a species, but in many cases also between species. Among all living things, there are certain basic units capable of forming both animal and plant life. This is quite obvious in plants -- for example, we often take cuttings, graft a branch, and can produce a new fruit tree that combines the strengths of two kinds of fruit trees. It's not common in animals, but it does happen. To give a simple example, a couple of days ago we talked about growing an artificial ear on a mouse³¹, using cloning methods to clone a human ear into an organ, then growing it on the back of a mouse, using the mouse's body to nourish that organ. Once the human ear grows to a certain extent, it can be used for transplantation, for people who have lost their ears in car accidents or disasters. All life possesses this ability; part of its basic functions can develop into a new form of life elsewhere, and it has the ability to develop into any kind of perceptual mechanism inherent in that form of life -- not only can it grow an external ear, but if science and technology develop enough, it can also grow an eye.

For this reason, theoretically you could see the world through the eyes of a frog, a bird, or an ant. Just as, if science reached a certain level and transplanted a frog's eye into your eyeball, connecting it to your optic nerve, then you would essentially be seeing the world through a frog's eyes.

When a consciousness tunes its frequency to a particular camouflage system, besides the senses ordinarily used by the inner self, there are also latent inner senses. That is, when we look at things with our eyes, we use vision, but beyond vision there are also latent inner senses -- the ability to see things without using the eyes, but we don't use it, so it lies dormant.

However, some inner senses cannot be expressed in concrete terms; language cannot describe them clearly, and their nature can only be hinted at through analogy. There is no need to discuss them in this book; they belong in a book devoted specifically to the inner senses. What does that mean? It means that, besides these nine inner senses, you have other inner senses, but in our current particular environment and system, as a human being, this ability is not needed, so it isn't mentioned.

In other words, physically speaking, your eyes have the ability to see the way an ant does; this is a potential your eyes possess, but this potential has been kept hidden. Just as when your cells became joints, they didn't become optic nerve cells -- it's the same principle. Besides the nine inner senses and the five outer senses, you have other sensory abilities, but those sensory abilities are of no use to you as a human being, as an earth creature, so he didn't discuss them. The book he mentioned that would be devoted specifically to the inner senses was never separately published later.

The Mother Civilization and the Speakers

Rob asked the 11th question, which corresponds to the reply to the 11th question. He said, when you spoke of the training required to transmit one of the manuscripts of the ancient Speakers, you said that many of those ancient languages involved pictures and hieroglyphic symbols. When Jane is in a trance state, with your help, could Jane draw some pictures, some words, or some symbols? He was just curious, wanting to know whether she could draw something approximating a Speaker language. Seth said it was possible. Rob said that would be very interesting; he actually wanted Jane to try it, asking whether she could try it now.

So you can see, Rob is actually a person who pays a lot of attention to external things. He was always looking for some kind of evidence. Everyone has this mentality — we always think, can you give us some proof, some evidence? If Jane could draw some ancient writing, would that prove this matter? But Seth directly refused him.

He said that among these figures there are many distorted inner connections. The mother civilization used some hieroglyphs and symbols. Actually, in our ancient times there were also such things — the oracle bone script is hieroglyphic, including symbols, and the Maya culture and ancient Egyptian writing also contain many hieroglyphs. He specifically mentioned the mother civilization here. The mother civilization is not elaborated in detail in this book, but if you look at another book, the one I mentioned before, Thiaoouba Prophecy³², this book specifically introduces the development of the entire human civilization on Earth. According to Seth's account, it is the process of the third civilization — Seth did not introduce the third civilization; he only introduced the first and the second, with more detail on the second and a brief introduction to the first as well. For some reason he did not mention the third. And this book Thiaoouba Prophecy³² specifically gives a detailed overview of the entire human civilization. According to its account, the first human civilization was about 1.35 million years ago³³, and the first batch of humans were actually extraterrestrials who settled here. This book specifically mentions a large continent called the Motherland, translated as MU, pronounced "mu," and in the original English it is MU. The Motherland was a period of highly developed civilization.

If you want to understand the material about the Motherland, you can refer to the introduction of the Motherland in this book. I introduced this book in the previous session.

Can the Material Be Passed to Someone Else

Session 584. Rob asked question 58: Besides the laws of the inner universe that you gave in Session 50 on May 4, 1964, are there others? Seth said, Of course there are, but since I am not including those in this book, I will give them to you at another time. If you are interested, you can look up Session 50 in The Early Sessions; we will not go into that here today.

Question 44: If you had not spoken through Jane before, would you do so through someone else? Or are you doing so anyway, regardless? In other words, does this work have to be done? Or are you doing it right now?

Seth said, I have also spoken through others. You understand? He said "this time" -- he put it in quotes, because time only represents our human time -- this arrangement was already made long ago. Indeed, Ruburt did not necessarily have to accept this arrangement.

This touches on a question many people ask: Since my soul has arranged many life plans and life activities for me, do I have to follow them? Where is my free will? Can I refuse to be a puppet and live in my own way? Here he tells you: Yes, you can. None of the arrangements are fixed; it is only that such an arrangement exists, and you may choose not to accept it.

If Jane had not accepted, the material would still have been given, but in a different way. He would not have spoken in this manner. Because this kind of work requires a certain special rapport, and the people involved must have precise characteristics in that regard; not just anyone would do. If it had been through another person, the material might have been given in a much simpler way, but I want to keep it as undistorted as possible, and fully multidimensional.

He is actually implying with this sentence that the material he transmits through Jane is not fully multidimensional -- because once it becomes language in our three-dimensional world, three-dimensional language, it is inherently distorted. If it were transmitted through another person, the material could be fully multidimensional, and as undistorted as possible. That person had actually already been chosen, existing as a backup; if Jane did not transmit it, he would go to that person. That person's other knowledge and abilities are different from Jane's, and perhaps he could understand this multidimensional knowledge and transmit this fully multidimensional material. But there is also a drawback: that kind of fully multidimensional material is basically impossible for humans to accept or understand, or they simply would not know what he was talking about.

He said, If Ruburt could not take part, the material would be given to a speaker who, in your terms, is still alive. A person who was still alive in the 1970s. He said this person is also involved in creative work -- an artist or architect or something of that sort. And still living within your system. Aside from yourselves, no one in the past has had great rapport with me.

He said that speaker would probably receive the material in the dream state and write it as a series of treatises, or as a fictionalized narrative. If Ruburt had not accepted this work, it is highly likely that he would have chosen to fulfill this task in another life, and if that had been the case, I would have waited for him. Why? Because they had rapport. However, the decision was always his. And if he simply did not accept it, there would have been other arrangements -- if he did not accept it through several reincarnations, then he would have other arrangements. That is to say, Seth was determined to transmit this material one way or another, but he preferred to work with Ruburt and Rob, because they had an understanding.

Session 584

The Origin of the Trio

As for you, Rob, Seth said:

You had long foreseen your role in these sessions and in our work. A painting you did many years ago clearly foreshadowed the development of your own psychic efforts.

Many years ago, Rob painted a picture that was highly predictive of his development in terms of psychological effort. This painting was later sold. Before it was sold, it hung for quite a while in the spot where the portrait of Seth now hangs. It was a portrait of Joseph -- Joseph is the name of Rob's entity. In other words, at that time Rob intuitively perceived his own inner identity, which was Joseph, and he was actually able to paint it. But he did not consciously perceive this connection; his conscious mind did not know who the person in the painting was. Yet he was consciously aware of the strong impact that painting had on him, and that sense of impact was very intense.

Rob began to explain. He said he knew that painting; it was done in 1954, more than ten years before this time. Jane and he were not yet married then; he painted it in Florida. He had a photograph of the painting -- in that era it was not as convenient as it is now with cell phones, where you can just pull one out and snap a picture; he had to specifically find a camera to photograph it. He thought that someday he would paint it again, that he wanted to do a new version, not that he wanted to completely replicate it. But he did not regret selling the painting; he just felt he should paint it again -- he could feel that intense impact the painting had on him.

Seth said that the painting also represented the part of your creative pursuit that had not yet been satisfied, requiring more understanding and knowledge. The peculiar relationship that existed between you and Ruburt was also a prerequisite -- the two of them had to get married first for this possibility to exist. At the same time, your permission and acceptance were also necessary.

I think I gave a rough introduction earlier to how Jane and Rob met and married; it was very magical. At that time Jane was already married. She met Rob on a special occasion -- at a gathering of friends. The first time they met, they did not say much to each other; they just got to know each other. The second time they met, Jane directly said to Rob: "Take me away with you; I will go with you." Just like that, so directly. Jane was still in a married state; she was already someone else's wife at the time, and she said this to Rob, and Rob agreed. Later Jane got divorced and was together with Rob. It was that magical, that incredible; the two of them were together from then on, all the way up to now.

All of these things had to be in place. Things that seem strange were actually arranged in advance. If you had kept refusing to participate, these sessions would not have begun. Because having Jane alone was not enough, and having Ruburt alone was not enough. Why did the three of them have to be a combination?

Because you were once connected to the same entity. Jane and Rob were once the same entity. Their relationship was not an ordinary one. Joseph and Ruburt were originally under the same entity; later Joseph left on his own and independently became a brand-new entity. So if a personality evolves to a certain degree, or if it has a strong will, it can become an entity on its own; it does not necessarily have to remain attached to the original entity. Here we have a typical example. They became independent, but this inner relationship actually increased the energy.

You could say you helped stabilize that circuit -- the circuit through which Ruburt and Seth transmitted. You activated your initial energy and original impetus to help Ruburt. So now you know that in the process of transmitting the Seth books, Rob, Jane, and Seth were one; if any one of them were missing, this transmission could not have been completed. This is also why, after Jane passed away, this material was no longer transmitted.

This kind of work requires not only that one individual be necessary, but also that the efforts of many other factors be taken into account. For example, we knew that Ruburt needed your support, just as we also knew that this work itself would help your own creative abilities. This work could help Rob develop his own creativity, and he would also improve in painting; for Jane, it would also help with her writing. All of this was decided by the two of you, and also by me, before this particular lifetime of yours had even begun -- that is, the three of them had discussed and agreed upon it.

Even Ruburt's rational questioning, and his often very deep sense of reluctance about the work and the feeling of reluctance, were known in advance, and were even modified into a design that helped the work. This material was not meant for born believers -- not for people whose faith is especially strong, who believe whatever they are told -- but for intelligent people, and for a medium who would question him. So when Jane and Rob first made contact with Seth, in the early sessions, they kept questioning Seth's existence. You questioned on your own behalf, and also for all those who had the same doubts as you. He asked not only for himself, but also for those who would read this book in the future, because they would all have the same doubts. This kind of doubt is normal; toward channeled information, this kind of doubt is normal. If Jane herself had a questioning, rationally questioning attitude toward him, that would actually be beneficial to the transmission.

Therefore, as Ruburt gradually came to understand, as he continued to develop, he won victories not only for himself, but also for those who followed him on his adventure. But we also needed a balance -- with Rob serving as such a person. What kind of balance? He could intuitively recognize the value of the inner information and the importance of the material. Jane was actually the one who initially questioned this material; rationally speaking, she did not want to be the one channeling it. At that point, a Rob was needed, someone who instinctively felt that this material was very good. So Jane and Rob discussed for a long time at the very beginning whether they should continue doing this, because it took a great deal of time and energy; they were almost doing it full-time. For Rob at least -- Jane still had time to do other things, but after Rob finished recording, he still had to type it out. In those days there were no computers; it was all typewriters. He first wrote shorthand by hand, then reorganized it the next day, and then typed it out one key at a time on a typewriter. So Rob was needed to affirm this matter, to tell Jane the importance of this material and its inner significance, so that the material could continue to be transmitted. If it had been up to Jane alone, she probably would have quit long ago. In other words, Rob saw the importance of the material more clearly than Jane did -- although Jane was the one transmitting it all along, her level of recognition was not as deep as Rob's.

At a much deeper level, there was no reluctance on Ruburt's part. Inwardly he had no reluctance, even though outwardly he showed resistance on a rational level. Why did he criticize and question Seth? It was actually to reassure Jane's ego, to ensure that the ego would not be pushed aside or damaged -- these arrangements all had a purpose.

As a medium, a person like Jane requires characteristics very similar to those needed by a person of intense creativity. A strong, supportive ego is necessary, especially in the beginning stages. During the period when severe personality disturbances accompanied great creativity -- that is, when she first made contact with Seth, with higher dimensions, the creativity was enormous, and at that time the personality was also severely disturbed, because she discovered that another person was occupying her dominant position, that another Seth was occupying Jane's dominant position. The ego was terrified by the power of creativity -- the ego had never imagined that there was such a great creativity that it did not know about, and it was afraid of being crushed.

In such cases, the ego is too rigid, too stubborn, and does not develop along with the person's entire creative experience. This can happen in channeling, just as it can happen in any other creative activity -- painting, music, and so on. If the creativity is especially strong, the ego will feel a sense of being crushed, because it feels useless. In this case, however, Ruburt's ego gradually began to relax its rigidity, and in a gradual process, allowed the whole personality -- including itself -- to expand. His ego was also developing; it also began to have tolerance, tolerating the whole personality, including the expansion of both his conscious and unconscious aspects.

Afterward Seth was joking with him, saying, you read a book, and the idea of relaxing the muscular armor is a very good one -- that kind of feeling, just let the ego relax.

Chapter Summary

The 52 questions in Chapter 20, on questions and answers, were not covered in their original order; basically, we went through all of them in a general way. The content after that begins to introduce the next chapter. Chapter 21 is about the meaning of religion.

注释与核实

1. Source: Wikipedia, "Prince Sattva" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prince_Sattva) ↩

2. Source: Jane Roberts (Seth), The Nature of Personal Reality (https://nowdictation.com/q/emerson/) ↩

3. This claim could not be verified. ↩

4. Source: Jane Roberts (Seth), Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul, Chapter 20, Session 578, 1971 (https://nowdictation.com/q/pyrenees/) ↩

5. This claim could not be verified. ↩

6. According to Mike's original words: "If it were not for World War II, if Germany and the United States had not accelerated their arms race in the later period and invested unlimited costs in the field of the atomic bomb"; upon verification, it should be: "In World War II, only the United States invested unlimited costs in the atomic bomb (the Manhattan Project cost about 2 billion dollars and employed over 100,000 people); Germany did not engage in an accelerated nuclear arms race with it—the German uranium program (Uranverein) had a budget of only about 8 million Reichsmarks, and in early 1942 the German military concluded that nuclear fission would not play a decisive role in the war and downgraded it to ordinary research, leaving it at the experimental stage until the end of the war." (Source: Wikipedia, "German nuclear program during World War II," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/German_nuclear_program_during_World_War_II) ↩

7. Source: U.S. Department of Energy Office of Science, "DOE Explains...Relativity" (https://www.energy.gov/science/doe-explainsrelativity) ↩

8. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Relativity: Relativistic mass" (https://www.britannica.com/science/relativity/Relativistic-mass) ↩

9. Source: Wikipedia, "M-theory" (https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/M%E7%90%86%E8%AE%BA) ↩

10. Source: Wikipedia, "History of string theory" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_superstring_revolution) ↩

11. Source: European Space Agency (ESA), "Planck's new cosmic recipe" (https://sci.esa.int/web/planck/-/51557-planck-new-cosmic-recipe) ↩

12. Source: Nobel Prize official website, "Samuel C.C. Ting – Biographical" (https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/physics/1976/ting/biographical/) ↩

13. This claim could not be verified. ↩

14. This claim could not be verified. ↩

15. According to Mike's original words: "In India there were two girls who were wolf children, raised by wolves"; upon verification, it should be: "India did have two girls known as 'wolf children'—Amala and Kamala from Midnapore in 1920—but the claim that they were 'raised by wolves' comes solely from the account of Reverend J.A.L. Singh, whose diary and photographs were later found to have been fabricated after the fact (the photographs were taken in 1937, after both had died), and the academic community generally regards the case as a hoax." (Source: Wikipedia, "Amala and Kamala," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amala_and_Kamala) ↩

16. According to Mike's original words: "Take a newborn chimpanzee and raise it together with his family's child"; upon verification, it should be: "In 1931, psychologists Winthrop and Luella Kellogg did bring the chimpanzee Gua into their home and raised her together with their son Donald as siblings for about nine months, but Gua was already seven and a half months old when she arrived, not a newborn (Donald was ten months old at the time)." (Source: Wikipedia, "Gua (chimpanzee)," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gua_(chimpanzee)) ↩

17. Source: Wikipedia, "On the Origin of Species" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Origin_of_Species) ↩ ↩²

18. This claim could not be verified. ↩

19. Source: Israel Antiquities Authority, Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library, "The Dead Sea Scrolls — Scrolls Content" (https://www.deadseascrolls.org.il/learn-about-the-scrolls/scrolls-content?locale=en_US) ↩

20. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Biblical literature: Texts and versions" (https://www.britannica.com/topic/biblical-literature/Texts-and-versions) ↩

21. Source: University of Southern California, West Semitic Research Project, "Discovering the Dead Sea Scrolls" (https://dornsife.usc.edu/wsrp/discovering-the-dead-sea-scrolls/) ↩

22. According to Mike's original words: "Eleven caves were discovered, jars were found, and forty thousand scrolls were found"; upon verification, it should be: "The Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered in eleven caves near Qumran, some stored in clay jars, but what was unearthed was about 15,000 fragments, representing approximately 800 to 900 original scrolls, not forty thousand scrolls." (Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Dead Sea Scrolls," https://www.britannica.com/topic/Dead-Sea-Scrolls) ↩

23. Source: Hebrew University of Jerusalem, "Hebrew University Archaeologists Find 12th Dead Sea Scrolls Cave" (https://www.afhu.org/2017/02/08/hebrew-university-archaeologists-find-12th-dead-sea-scrolls-cave/) ↩

24. Source: Wikipedia, "4QMMT" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/4QMMT) ↩

25. According to Mike's original words: "In the 1990s, the Israeli government, under pressure, increased the number of scholars studying this to twenty"; upon verification, it should be: "Around 1990, what the Israel Antiquities Authority expanded under pressure was the size of the Dead Sea Scrolls editorial team: starting in 1988, scroll assignments were increased, and by 1992 more than fifty scholars were involved (not increased to twenty—a size of about twenty had already been reached as early as 1984 when Strugnell became editor-in-chief)." (Source: Library of Congress, "Scrolls from the Dead Sea: Two Thousand Years Later," https://www.loc.gov/exhibits/scrolls/today.html) ↩

26. According to Mike's original words: "The United States established a Biblical Archaeology Society, founded in 1985"; upon verification, it should be: "The Biblical Archaeology Society in the United States was founded in 1974 by Hershel Shanks in Washington, D.C., not in 1985." (Source: Wikipedia, "Biblical Archaeology Society," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biblical_Archaeology_Society) ↩

27. Source: UPI, "Library opens access to Dead Sea Scrolls" (1991) (https://www.upi.com/Archives/1991/09/22/Library-opens-access-to-Dead-Sea-Scrolls/5728685512000/) ↩

28. Source: Israel Antiquities Authority, "The Leon Levy Dead Sea Scrolls Digital Library — The Digital Library" (https://www.deadseascrolls.org.il/about-the-project/the-digital-library) ↩

29. Source: Wikipedia, "The Longest Day in Chang'an" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Longest_Day_in_Chang'an) ↩ ↩²

30. This claim could not be verified. ↩ ↩²

31. Source: Wikipedia, "Vacanti mouse" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacanti_mouse) ↩

32. Source: Michel Desmarquet, Thiaoouba Prophecy (English translation sample chapters by Samuel Chong) (https://www.chinasona.org/Thiaoouba/publish-sample-chapters-3.html) ↩ ↩²

33. Source: Michel Desmarquet, Thiaoouba Prophecy, Chapter 3, "The First Man on Earth" (https://www.chinasona.org/Thiaoouba/publish-sample-chapters-3.html) ↩