Mike's commentary · Seth Speaks, Chapter 3

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

Introduction

In this chapter, Seth explains his own way of working: he communicates through telepathy, can perceive past lives, and before entering different reality dimensions to teach, he needs to understand the root assumptions of that reality. He points out that space is an illusion, that physical reality is created by the spiritual nature of consciousness, that thoughts and emotions have electromagnetic reality, and that the soul or entity is more than consciousness and designs lifetime after lifetime. He also discusses how three-dimensional experience is a training ground, and how a person can break through the barriers of reality by tracing thoughts and exploring the escape points of consciousness.

Key Points of This Chapter

• Seth communicates through telepathy, can perceive his own past lives, and thoughts and emotions cannot be hidden, yet there exists a psychic etiquette of not casually probing into others.
• Space is an illusion, caused by the physical senses and mental patterns; physical reality is a form taken by a larger reality, and its essence is the psychic creation of consciousness.
• The soul or entity is more than consciousness; consciousness is only one attribute available to it; the soul designs its own existence and its successive lives, and endows the personality with pre-established concepts and psychological equipment.
• Thoughts and emotions possess a unique electromagnetic reality, and their intensity determines the durability of physical images; all consciousnesses together create the physical world.
• Three-dimensional experience is an invaluable training ground; a person can break through the barriers of reality by tracing thoughts and exploring the places where consciousness escapes or comes to an end.

Main Text

Seth's Work and Dimensions of Reality

In this chapter, Seth introduces his work and the dimensions of reality he has entered. This chapter is likewise composed of three sessions, drawn from Sessions 518, 519, and 520 respectively. We will now begin with Session 518.

Seth says:

I have friends, even as you do, although my friends may be of long standing. You must understand that we experience our own reality in a far different fashion than you do. I am aware of the selves that you would call "past" selves, the personalities we adopted in those various existences.

What this passage means is that the biggest difference between him and us is that they can perceive their own past lives, while we ourselves cannot. Because they communicate through telepathy, they have nothing to hide from one another; even if they wanted to hide something, it would be difficult. He says you will surely ask whether this raises the issue of privacy. But he assures you that the problem of privacy does not exist, because your thoughts are in a completely open, fully exposed state, and your family and friends are all quite clear about them.

I think you have all had some experience of this kind of telepathy. For example, when you are far from home and a close family member passes away, you can feel it, even waking suddenly in the middle of the night; or if something happens to someone in your family, a very agitated feeling arises in your heart, and you become restless and cannot sleep. Even with people especially close to you, when they make a decision, before they say it aloud, you already know their decision. So he says your family and friends are all quite clear about these things, and unfortunately, your enemies are just as clear about them as well; only you yourself are unaware of it.

If two people are frequent adversaries and very familiar with each other, then each actually knows what the other is thinking. It is like the struggle between Zhuge Liang and Sima Yi in Romance of the Three Kingdoms¹; they actually understood each other. Zhou Yu would often say, "If Heaven gave birth to Yu, why did it also give birth to Liang?" That is the same kind of feeling: each understood what the other was thinking.

But Seth says this does not mean that each of us is like an open book to everyone else, completely transparent at a glance. That is not how it is. Because they have a most basic spiritual courtesy, a spiritual decorum: you cannot casually open up another person's psyche, or open up another person's thoughts. That should require the other person's permission, or the two of you must have a very close relationship for such a possibility to exist. You cannot just have some random passerby come along and casually flip open someone else's thoughts and ideas. This is a most basic courtesy, just as you cannot casually walk up to someone on the street and rummage through the contents of their bag.

He then goes on to say:

In other existences we were well aware of the power of thought. They did not find that one could escape the great creativity of mental images or emotions. This does not mean that we are not spontaneous, or that we must deliberate between one thought and another, worrying that one might be negative or destructive. In your terms, we have gone beyond these.

What this passage means is that they are well aware that the power of thought or spirit is immense. They do not flee from this great creativity of mental images or emotions. By "flee," he means they do not think that one emotion is good and another is bad, or that some emotion is negative, and so on. They do not have that kind of feeling; they simply use these emotions and spirit to create.

He says:

Our psychological structures do mean, however, that we can communicate in far more ways than you are familiar with.

He gives an example: it is like when you meet a childhood friend, someone from elementary or middle school. You no longer have much in common now; perhaps you live in one country and he lives in another, or the gap between your lives has become very wide. But you can spend a pleasant afternoon chatting by discussing the teachers you both knew and your former classmates, and through this establish a very harmonious relationship. It is the same for them. When he "meets" someone — here he puts "meets" in quotation marks — that is, when he communicates with another person, he can also take as a basis some past-life experience from one of that person's previous existences, and they too can get along very well. For example, after meeting someone, he can chat about people and events they experienced together in the fourteenth century, and they can talk just as enjoyably.

He says we will soon understand that we ourselves are multidimensional beings, multidimensional persons, and that on one level of our existence we share many common environments. That is to say, in our various reincarnations, each of us has actually shared certain common environments with the other people around you. The people around you — whether relatives, friends, classmates, or colleagues — as long as they are connected to you, or even some who are not connected to you, all of you actually have some common environments, some eras you lived through together. I do not mean now; I mean before. He says this only applies as a fairly simple analogy for the moment, because past, present, and future do not really exist in that way; there is no temporal thing. He is only using this to illustrate the concept of past and present lives.

He goes on to emphasize:

Our experience does not include the time style with which you are familiar. We have far more friends and colleagues, simply because we are aware of the various connections we have temporarily formed in past reincarnations.

He only provisionally calls it "past," because actually there is no such thing as the past. Therefore they have more knowledge at their disposal, because he can communicate with all the people of past lives — his own past lives, and even the past lives of other people. In your terms, any era you can mention — for example, the Tang, Song, Ming, and Qing dynasties, all the various historical periods — many people have come through those eras, and they carry with them the indelible experience gained in those lifetimes.

He says:

We do not feel it necessary to hide our emotions or thoughts.

There is no need to hide your emotions and thoughts, and you cannot hide them anyway. At their level they cannot be hidden, and at our level they cannot be hidden either. You only think you can hide them, but in fact people with real ability, or people who communicate with you, can all understand them — not to mention someone like Seth.

Here I will give an example. There was a researcher who had practiced spiritual cultivation for a long time before studying Seth, and spent three years carefully studying the Seth material. What ability did he develop? When a person sat in front of him and the two of them communicated face to face, he could instantly know everything that had happened in that person's past. It was like fortune-telling: the person did not need to open his mouth to ask, and he already knew the person's past. He said he did not know how he had acquired this ability; as soon as he met the person, he knew. So this is a normal thing — each of us has this basic telepathic ability. Do not find it strange.

So he says:

We all recognize the nature of emotions and consciousness as cooperating with the reality around you, and our role within it. We are spiritually high-spirited ghosts.

He says they are spiritually high-spirited ghosts, simply because they can fully command their own energy, and have not diverted their energy into conflict. By "conflict," he means that kind of entanglement and suffering — being torn between two different thoughts or emotions, or even entangled in two contradictory emotions. They use this energy for unique, individual purposes, and that is a basic part of their psychological experience.

He says:

Each whole self, or multidimensional personality, has its own purposes, missions, and creative endeavors that are its own initial and most basic part, and that also determine the qualities that make it eternal, immortal, and ever-seeking.

Every personality, every multidimensional personality, or every whole self, possesses such an eternal, unchanging, immortal, ever-seeking quality.

We are finally free to use our energy in those directions.

They have finally freed themselves from physical limitations and can use their energy in those directions.

We face many quite formidable challenges, and we realize that not only are our purposes themselves important, but the unexpected side branches that develop in our efforts to pursue them are also important. As we work toward our purposes, we recognize that we are blazing trails for others as pioneers. We also suspect that these purposes themselves will have unexpected results, astonishing consequences that we never anticipated, and that they will only lead to new pathways. Recognizing this allows us to maintain a certain sense of humor.

What he means is that every whole self or multidimensional personality has its own sense of purpose. When we develop according to this purpose, we will certainly face very formidable challenges, but you simply overcome them and pursue them, striving to realize them. In the process of striving toward your purpose, there are bound to be many side branches — it cannot possibly be smooth sailing, one straight road all the way through; it is certainly winding. Perhaps these winding parts are precisely what blaze trails for others.

This is somewhat like the games we often play. When a game begins, the map is entirely black; you have no idea what is where. But your purpose is to defeat the enemy. You know there must be an enemy somewhere on this map, and you have to find him and eliminate him. As you explore for this purpose, sending out scouts and small squads to investigate, you are actually gradually opening up the entire map and the world, revealing it before you. Along the way you may encounter difficulties and obstacles, and after you overcome them, you may be opening up new paths for those who come later, or for those who walk the same road, even clearing away the fog ahead of them. You can use this game analogy to illustrate how, as you press forward toward your purpose, you may actually also be doing trailblazing work for others.

He says:

When one has died many times, and each time expected complete extinction, and then discovers that existence still continues, there is a sense of comedy, of "divine comedy."

Here he notes that this is a reference to the original title of Dante's Divine Comedy², using a pun for humor. What he means is that when you discover you cannot die, that you reincarnate life after life in this way, your initial feeling is like a comedy, like a "divine comedy" — no matter what, you cannot die. At this point you begin to learn the creative joy of "play." It is like playing a computer game: the characters in a computer game never truly die; you can revive them at any time, though of course it may cost some points, may cost money, and previous experience points may be lost, but none of that matters — the character can still be revived. So you develop a kind of creative joy like playing a game — you discover, how interesting, you can be deathless.

He says:

If I believe that all creativity and consciousness are born of the nature of play rather than the nature of work, born of quickened intuitive spontaneity, then in all of our existence, and in the experience of others that I know, this is the constant norm.

All of our creativity, including the birth of consciousness, is based on playfulness rather than work. Because you cannot die, time after time, you participate in this process more in a playful manner, and this playfulness is a constant state.

He says:

For example, I communicate with your dimension not through my will to go to your plane of reality, but through imagining myself there. If I had known earlier what I know now, then all my deaths would have become adventures. On the one hand, you take life too seriously, and on the other hand, you do not take playful existence seriously enough.

This passage is very profound. When he wants to communicate with our three-dimensional world, it is not that he says, I want to go to your three-dimensional world, I must go resolutely, with purpose and strong belief — no, he simply thinks of it, and by imagination alone he can arrive there. Imagination does not require such firm will. He says if I had known earlier what I know now, then all my deaths would have become adventures — when you have reincarnated life after life, and when you know everything you experienced in your past lives, then those earlier deaths are no longer true deaths, but have become adventures, one after another, like adventures in a game.

"Taking life too seriously" means taking death too seriously. You think you only have one life, and this one must be lived well, because you only have this one chance — we have been instilled with this concept since childhood: life only comes once, so you must live it seriously and carefully, because once it is over there is no second time. He says the reason we take it too seriously is precisely because you believe life only comes once.

But on the other hand, as participants in this game, we do not play seriously enough. What does that mean? For example, suppose we knew we could not die, that we could come back to reincarnate again and again, to experience again and again. Then we would know that this life is actually like a game, and what matters is to experience it. It is like playing a game where each time you switch to a different game character, a different protagonist — what are you doing? Is it not just experiencing? Playing different dungeons, doing different quests. Doing the same thing over and over is meaningless.

So this lack of seriousness in the game experience means that although we know we have this life, or know we have many lives, in actual daily life we do not seriously play this game; we do not bring out all our potential, all our energy, all our time, to truly experience this life. We behave almost like robots, letting this life pass by very casually. We treat survival as the only goal — for the sake of earning a living, for a bigger house, a better car, a respectable job, a decent family, for these external, vain things — and we give up the experience and excitement we should have been pursuing in the game, making the process far too dull and monotonous. So he says we do not play the game seriously enough.

He says:

We enjoy an extremely spontaneous sense of play. You would call it responsible play.

You could also call this kind of thing responsible play. Anyone who has played games knows that when you team up to play, you are extremely serious — assigning roles, arranging tactics and strategies, all require precise planning.

He says:

It is indeed creative play. For example, we play with the mobility of our consciousness, to see how far one can send it out.

He is referring to their level. Because at their level, reincarnation no longer holds any excitement; they have already reincarnated countless times. So how do they play? They play with the mobility of consciousness — consciousness itself has mobility, and they see how far one can send it out. For example, can you send your consciousness across mountains and rivers to another city to take a look? That is seeing how far you can send your consciousness out.

He says:

We are often astonished at the products of our consciousness and the dimensions of reality we are able to traverse.

They too are astonished at the things their own consciousness can create, or at the different dimensions and different realities they can cross into. They go here and there, seemingly using their consciousness in play without any particular intention — just as we in a game do not have any particular intention either; having fun and being happy is enough — but from another perspective:

The pathways we create still continue to exist, available for others to use. We leave messages with spiritual signposts for any who come.

The roads they have traveled, the places they have explored — these paths still exist. It is like a game player who has played through a game and writes a guide for those who come later, telling you this place is dangerous, that place requires caution, where the treasure chests are, where you can learn new skills. They too leave their experience, the roads they have walked, as information for those who come later.

Therefore:

We can be spiritually high-spirited, yet we all use and understand the creative use of play, not only as a method of reaching ends and goals, but as a stunning creative endeavor in itself.

Here again he emphasizes the creative use of play, not treating the attainment of goals as the only objective — goals and purposes are not the only thing; the process itself is a creative endeavor.

He says:

In my work as a teacher, I travel in spirit to many dimensions, much as a traveling professor might lecture in different countries and states, though the similarity ends there. For before I begin my work, I must first establish a preliminary psychological structure, and I must first learn to know my students before I can begin teaching. I must have a thorough understanding of the particular reality systems in which my students operate, of their thought systems, of the meaningful symbols. I must accurately assess the stability of the student's personality. Those personality needs cannot be ignored; they must be taken into consideration.

In his teaching, he must prepare in advance, and must thoroughly understand the reality, the environment, the dimensional space in which the student resides, including the particular symbolic things of that time. For example, when he comes to our three-dimensional world, he knows the significance of religion to us; he also knows what Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, and various other religions mean to humanity and what their symbolism represents; he must even comprehend the inner, core things within them. Otherwise he could not communicate with and teach his students.

As the student continues to progress, he must be encouraged, but not excessively praised. The material must be presented in a way the student can understand given his or her grasp of reality, especially in the early stages. Even before serious study begins, great care must be taken that all levels of this personality develop at a more or less steady pace. That is to say, when formal teaching begins, one must ensure the balanced development of all levels of the person's personality; one cannot allow one aspect to develop especially quickly while others lag behind — if that happens, transmitting material to him, or teaching him, will be very problematic, because his psychological development is unbalanced.

He says:

In the very beginning, I usually present the material without any sign of my presence. This may seem like a startling revelation, because no matter how carefully I present the material, it is still destined to change the student's past ideas. Regardless of what I say, the student will naturally be pushed into psychic and psychological behavior and experience that seem quite foreign to his conscious level.

No matter what he says or introduces, it will certainly bring the student back from the material world into psychic or psychological behavior and experience, and this exploration appears very foreign to the student's material and conscious levels.

He says that depending on the system in which the student exists, there are different problems. For example, when he communicated with Jane:

I made initial contact long before the sessions began. At first Jane was not conscious of our meetings; she could only feel a sudden new idea. But as she was a poet, such ideas came to her as inspiration. So at a writers' conference several years ago, she entered another kind of trance state. This state might have led to the development of her psychic abilities before she was ready. The psychological climate of the people at that conference triggered the situation, and before she understood what was happening, Jane had entered a trance state.

He is referring to 1957³ — because this book was written in 1970 — the year Jane sold her first short story⁴. After selling it, she was invited to attend a writers' conference in Milford, Pennsylvania⁵. At the conference, there were several evenings of discussion, and during one of the evening discussions, Jane unknowingly entered a trance state. Afterwards, they even developed a five-person writers' group on that basis⁶.

Then Seth continues:

I knew from her childhood that she had psychic gifts, but the necessary insight was gained through poetry, until this person acquired the necessary background required in our case. Therefore, when I learned of the incident just mentioned, I saw to it that it ended and did not allow her to continue.

He had noticed from Jane's early childhood that her psyche was different from others. In martial arts novels we often hear of "extraordinary natural gifts," and such people do indeed exist — her sensitivity to spiritual matters, her insight, her perceptiveness were different from others. Later, when that trance state occurred, Seth promptly ended it and did not let her continue, because he felt she was not yet ready.

But that was not an accidental performance. Figuratively speaking, this person, without knowing it, had decided to try her wings. Therefore, part of my work was to begin training her from her early childhood. All of this was preliminary preparation for the serious work that began with our sessions.

That is to say, in order to transmit these sessions, Seth had been preparing since Jane was very young, opening up her psychic communication abilities and making preliminary contact and exchange with her.

This is part of the normal activity of my work on many other levels, for the structures of personalities differ, and my work therefore becomes highly varied. Although there are certain basic similarities in many of the systems in which I work, there are some dimensions in which I cannot be a teacher.

Because those students — the people he would want to teach — have basic concepts of experience that are foreign to his nature, and their learning processes are also outside his experience, so he cannot be a teacher in those places. He cannot be a teacher everywhere.

This is the content of Session 518.

Session 519: Space, the Soul, and the Nature of Reality

Starting with this session, Seth begins to discuss some core concepts, including some concepts about space. Let's see what he says.

Now, your concepts of space are highly erroneous, quite wrong.

When I contact your sphere of activity, I do not, like some spiritual superman, fly through golden skies and descend into your physical domain.

What he means is, don't imagine him as some kind of superman-like spiritual being flying around in the sky. That's not how it is.

I will discuss this point in later chapters. But in a very real manner, the space that you perceive simply does not exist. The illusion of space is caused not only by your own physical perceptive mechanisms, but by mental patterns that you have accepted, patterns adopted by consciousness within your system after evolving to a certain degree.

What he means is that space actually does not exist at all. But the reason we perceive it as existing is determined by two factors: one is our physical sensory system, meaning our eyes, nose, ears, the five senses of this physical perceptual system, which gives rise to the perception of its existence; and on the other hand, it is caused by our mental patterns after they have evolved to a certain degree, meaning our mental level, or what we might call our psychological structure, causes our cognition of this space to present itself in a certain way.

When you arrive, or emerge, in physical life, your mind is not a blank slate, waiting for experience to write its long scroll upon it.

Here he is pointing out some erroneous understanding we humans have. What he means is that we think that when we are born, our experience is a blank slate, and our brain is also a blank slate. We often say that a child is like a blank piece of paper, whatever you draw on it is what it becomes, whatever you write on it is what it becomes. That is what we believe. He says that is actually not the case. When you are born, you are already equipped with a memory bank that far exceeds any computer's storage. That is to say, at birth you already possess the memory capacity of the most powerful computer. Everything is already stored there; that database has always been there.

You already possess the skills and abilities to face the first day of life on this planet.

That is, on the very first day you arrive on this planet, you already possess all the abilities and all the skills needed to live on this planet. Although they may or may not all be used, you do not necessarily use every skill. And they are not merely the result of what you think of as heredity — here he emphasizes again that this is not inherited. You must remember that this is not caused by biological evolution, by the genetic inheritance passed from one generation to the next as in evolutionary theory. No. He is not denying that heredity has its hereditary function — that is a separate matter — but he says it is not merely heredity.

You can think of your soul or entity as... you can think of it as a conscious, living, divinely inspired computer.

He says this is only an analogy for now — you can think of the soul or entity, that higher-level soul, as a living, divinely inspired computer.

It designs its own existence and the programs for its lives, life after life.

This computer is very powerful. It can not only design itself — this computer designed itself, you need to be clear about this, the computer designed itself — it designs its own existence, and it also designs the programs for its lives, life after life.

But this computer is endowed with such high abilities that each different personality it designs, each life it designs, life after life, each life leaps into consciousness and life... and in turn creates realities that perhaps the computer itself never dreamed of.

It not only creates the lives, life after life, but also endows those lives with consciousness and human life. Moreover, the people or consciousness within those lives also create realities far beyond anything the computer itself had ever conceived or dreamed of. He uses this analogy to help you imagine what your soul actually is — it is like a very miraculous computer.

But each such personality carries with it a preconceived notion of the reality in which it will operate. Its psychological equipment is tailored specifically to suit this highly specialized environment.

This passage is again not easy to understand. What he means is that for your personality to survive in such a physical world, it has pre-established a basic concept. And psychologically it has also made corresponding preparations and tailoring — tailoring means that your psyche actually has a very large scope, but because you must face physical life, it has removed some functions that are not needed. That is the corresponding tailoring.

This is a characteristic of your present reincarnational life. It has full freedom, but it must operate within the framework of existence that has been planned for it. Yet in the most secret recesses of the personality, there lies the entire condensed knowledge contained within the computer. I must stress that I am not saying that the soul or entity is a computer, but merely asking you to look at the matter in this way in order to clarify several points.

He says that when you come here, a pre-stored range of existence has already been delineated for you, and you must operate within this planned range of existence. That is to say, as just mentioned, this computer of your soul has already designed your lives, life after life, and the programs have already been written. But in the most hidden place of your personality, there is hidden the condensed, compressed knowledge within the computer — the knowledge of the soul has been directly brought down. He must emphasize that he is not saying the soul or entity is a computer; he is only using this method to help you understand.

Each personality is not only born with the ability to obtain new ways of existence within its environment, but also creatively adds to the quality of its own consciousness, and in so doing, penetrates the specialized system, breaking through the barriers of the reality it knows.

That is, this personality not only has pre-written programs and operates according to those programs, it also possesses the ability to acquire new ways of survival or existence. It has its own capacity for exploration and innovation. When it creatively enhances that part of its consciousness's character, it has already penetrated the limitations of this three-dimensional world and reached the level of higher-dimensional space, breaking through the barriers of this three-dimensional reality that it itself perceives. He uses the word "penetrates."

Now, all of this has its purpose.

He says he will discuss this topic later. He brings it up now to make you understand that your environment is not as "real" as you imagine it to be — he puts "real" in quotation marks. If your level of consciousness can reach a certain height, you are able to break through this kind of barrier.

When you are born, you are conditioned to perceive reality in a particular manner, and to interpret experience within a very limited and very intense range.

He says that when you are born, you are conditioned to perceive reality in a particular way, and to interpret experience within a very limited and very intense range. The "particular manner" he refers to is using your physical senses, your five senses, to perceive reality — and interpreting your experience within a very limited and very intense range, meaning interpreting your experience within this physical world. "Very limited" means that you actually have a much larger range and space.

Before I can clearly give you any conception of my environment, or of those other systems of reality in which I operate, I must explain this point. For example, between our environment and yours there is no space, no physical boundary separating us. To be honest, your concepts of reality, perceived through your physical senses or scientific instruments, or arrived at through deduction, bear little resemblance to the facts.

"Deduction" refers to the method of scientific reasoning and mathematical inference — for example, relativity, quantum mechanics, M-theory, these are all arrived at through deduction, because instruments can no longer see them. He is pointing out a fact here, and he states it very clearly.

Your planetary systems exist at once, in time and in space... The universe that you perceive with your naked eye or with instruments appears to be composed of galaxies and other stars, planets, and stars at varying distances from you. Basically, however, this is an illusion.

He says the universe you see is an illusion. He means that our entire universe is an illusion — not just that the stars and galaxies are illusions. The table in front of you, the bench, the trees, the books, all of these are illusions. He is now addressing this issue from a more macroscopic perspective.

Your senses and your very existence as physical creatures are designed so that you perceive the universe in this way. The universe you know is your interpretation of events as they intrude upon your three-dimensional reality.

He gives a definition of the universe: the universe you think you know is your interpretation of the phenomena of intrusion when events intrude upon your three-dimensional reality. You call this interpretation the universe.

Those events are psychic. This does not mean, for example, that you cannot travel to other planets within that physical universe, any more than it means that you cannot use a table to hold books, glasses, or oranges.

As just mentioned, all of these are a kind of illusion. These events — your understanding of the universe — are actually a kind of psychic event intruding into the three-dimensional world. The interpretation of these events that we are able to perceive is what we call the universe. Because of its inner essence, we cannot see the essence of the three-dimensional world. It is actually just like the relationship between yin and yang that was discussed long ago in the I Ching: yin is the thing you cannot see, the thing that is the inner essence of matter, the thing at its spiritual or conscious level, the thing invisible to your naked eye. But that thing is the essence of this thing. What it manifests in the three-dimensional world, we call the manifested thing — the things you can see are all yang things. So you can understand yin and yang this way: things at the spiritual level are manifested into the three-dimensional world for you to see, and only then can you see them.

But what he means is that this does not mean you cannot go to Mars, go to Venus, go to other planets in the galaxy — of course you can enter them, you can enter these planets. Just because they are an interpretation of events at the spiritual level in the three-dimensional world, you should not deny their material existence. No. He gives an example: take the table in front of you. We know that the table itself appears to us as material, but it is actually composed of atoms. How large is the distance between atoms? If you compared the Earth to an atom, the size of the nucleus would be equivalent to a basketball.⁷ That is, if an atom were the Earth, the nucleus would only be the size of a basketball. In that much space, there is only a basketball-sized thing at the center of an Earth — that is the form of an atom. You know that the table is composed of such things, so logically it should be empty. The actual matter only occupies about one-thousandth, 0.01% of its range, and the remaining 99.99% is empty⁸ — yet the table can still function like a solid object. You can place all sorts of things on it: your books, your coffee cup, your notebook, your computer, all of it works.

So he is telling you that if you delve into the material level of the table itself, it is empty. If you go down further into the atom, it is still a kind of quantum state, and according to superstring theory, it is a string, and this string is a segment of energy. It fundamentally has no matter at all, not even physicality.⁹ The table in front of you is a segment of energy, a pile of very tiny energy segments vibrating at high speed. That is to say, the essence of your table is a pile of energy with no form at all, yet in your perceptual world, it is a genuinely existing physical form. He uses this example to illustrate that the three-dimensional world we currently perceive is itself caused by these psychic events. Its underlying layer is of a conscious and psychic essence, and then it allows us to perceive it as the existence of a three-dimensional material thing. He uses the table as an analogy for these planets and stars — it is the same principle.

When I enter your system, I move through a series of psychic and psychological events, which you then interpret as space and time. And often I must also use these terms, because I must use them to communicate with you, rather than using my own language.

From his perspective, he has no concept of time and space. He only has a series of psychic or psychological events. At his level, all things are composed of psychic and psychological events, which we can also call a kind of activity of consciousness. And this is the essence of things. He says that from his dimension to our dimension, he passes through this series of psychological or psychic events, and we interpret these psychic and psychological events as concepts of time or dimension.

Root assumptions are those preconceived notions of reality that I have spoken of.

Root assumptions are a very important concept. Root assumptions are the preconceived notions we have about reality, meaning we have a basic set of preconceived notions about our world. It is on the basis of this agreement that you build up your concepts of existence.

Space and time, for example, are root assumptions.

Every reality — here "reality" means every space-time or every world — has its own set of root assumptions. These root assumptions follow a certain agreement, and only then can our concepts of existence be established. They are the foundational core for constructing our world. For example, space and time are the most basic root assumptions. If there were no space and time, our three-dimensional world would not exist. So in order to live in this three-dimensional world, we must have such root assumptions. Every reality system has its own set of such agreements — our three-dimensional world has this agreement, and perhaps other dimensional worlds have another set of agreements. These agreements are completely different, and we cannot apply the agreements of our three-dimensional world to others.

When I communicate within your system, I must apply and understand the root assumptions upon which that system is based.

That is, Seth is not within this system. When he wants to communicate with people in our system, he must use and understand the root assumptions of this system. He must understand our concepts of space and time; otherwise he cannot communicate with us.

As a teacher, understanding and applying these is part of his basic work... I have existed in many such systems, as part of my basic training.

That is, he has lived in different realities, and this is the basic training he must undergo before he can go into different realities to teach others. Although you may call it that, my colleagues and I give it different names.

Let me give a simple example: suppose you are a teacher, a professor, and you want to go to different places to give lectures. To go to different countries, for example, if you want to go to Africa to teach, you would first need to learn some African languages in order to teach the local people. That is relatively easy to understand — you just need to learn some languages and understand the local living environment. But now suppose you want to teach an ant. How would you do it? You would need to understand the ant's perceptual system of space and time, its cognitive system of its own reality. You would need to understand it, and after completing this kind of basic training, you could then communicate with the ant and teach it. That is what he means.

The entity or soul has a far more creative and complicated nature than your religions have ever granted it.

Here he repeatedly uses "entity" and "soul," and these two actually mean the same thing. Entity is soul, soul is entity. He simply prefers not to use the word "soul" because it carries too many religious connotations — the moment you think of "soul," many images pop into your mind. So he often uses the word "entity," which is a very neutral new term that does not carry so much ambiguity or that innate imaginative space, and will not mislead you. But you must understand that they are actually referring to the same thing.

The soul applies innumerable methods of perception, and it has at its command many other kinds of consciousness.

That is, the soul can use countless methods of perception, and there are various other kinds of consciousness at its command. He says your concept of the soul is truly limited by your three-dimensional concepts. Because our imagination is limited — after all, we live in a three-dimensional world, and our perception of time and space is completely different from theirs. We are limited by space and also limited by time, while they are free of both limitations simultaneously. So our understanding of the soul is also limited by three-dimensional thinking. We often wonder: if our soul is here, can it not also be there? After I project a portion of myself out, what happens to the original body, and what is the relationship between the two? Many of these questions are thought about within three-dimensional concepts.

The soul is able to change the focus of its consciousness.

It uses consciousness the way you use the eyes in your head — if the soul is our true self, then consciousness is the eyes. You need to be clear about the relationship between them.

Now at my level of existence, I know that I am not my consciousness.

This statement is very profound. What he means is that at his level, he knows that he is not his consciousness — in other words, you are not your consciousness. Many people believe that their consciousness is themselves, that the conscious self that is thinking and reading right now is themselves, and that there is no other self beyond that. Then he tells you: no — consciousness is not you, not your self. Consciousness is consciousness, you are you; these are two different things. Consciousness is merely a tool of yours, just like your eyes. You must remember this point and not mistake your consciousness for yourself. Many of us, when we were first confused and could not understand spiritual thinking or higher-dimensional thinking, were mainly confused right here: mistaking consciousness for the self, and believing it deeply, treating consciousness as the self every time we think.

Though this fact may seem strange... my consciousness is an attribute available to me.

He says that for Seth himself, consciousness is an attribute he can use. This point applies to every reader of this book — for us it is the same. Consciousness is only an attribute available to us, even though you may not know this.

The soul or entity is more than consciousness.

What he is telling you here is that your soul and entity are far more than your consciousness. Consciousness is not the whole of you.

Therefore, when I enter your environment, I turn my consciousness in your direction. In a certain manner, I translate what I am into events that you can understand to some degree. In a far more limited way, any artist, when he translates what he is, or a portion of it, into a painting, is doing the same thing. Here, at least, we can use such a thought-provoking analogy.

What does this mean? It means that when he enters our environment, he is essentially adjusting the direction of his consciousness toward us. You can think of consciousness as a flashlight, or as a camera lens — wherever it is pointed, it can see there. The world is very large. There are lenses with tenfold zoom, a hundredfold zoom, and there are wide-angle lenses that can see very broadly. You can imagine consciousness as a kind of lens that is constantly focusing. Within different focal ranges, it can see and clearly perceive different things. Wherever consciousness focuses, that is what it can perceive.

He gives a vivid example: when a painter or artist wants to tell others about an idea he has, he often uses a painting to display it. When he paints that picture, he has an image in his mind, or an impulse, or a creative desire, and he turns that thing into a painting. Seth says that when he communicates with us, it is the same idea — he is making a kind of translation of his consciousness into a form that we can understand at our level. Just as when you look at a painting, you can partially understand the painter's state of mind at the time and the ideas behind the painting, but you cannot fully understand it. It is the same.

When I enter your system, I intrude into three-dimensional reality, that is certain. And you must interpret what happens according to your own root assumptions.

As just mentioned, we have a set of root assumptions about the three-dimensional world. For example, space-time is a root assumption, the speed of light is also a root assumption, conservation of energy — these are all root assumptions. We interpret what happens based on these root assumptions.

Now whether or not you are aware of it, each of you, in your dream states, intrudes into other systems of reality.

He gives a positive example: Seth enters our three-dimensional reality, and we use our root assumptions to explain the event of Seth's entry — for example, how he is channeling through Jane, how they communicate through some kind of psychic rotational plane, and so on. That is how you use a three-dimensional perspective to understand and interpret this event. He gives a counterexample: without realizing it, we are also intruding into other people's realities, just as Seth intrudes into our reality, except you are not aware of it. For example, in dreams, you intrude into other realities, but your normal conscious self does not fully participate — the active, waking conscious you does not participate in your dream state.

In subjective experience, you leave physical existence behind... and sometimes in dreams, you act with strong purpose and creative effectiveness.

In dreams you can do very radical things, very active things, very creative things. Although the moment you wake up you forget that dream, while you are in the dream doing all these lively, creative tasks and experiencing many things, upon waking you basically forget it all. The part you do not forget has been translated — it is not everything from the dream. Because the dream is also a matter of a hyper-dimensional, beyond-three-dimensional space. Many things that happen there are very difficult to explain and understand in your three-dimensional world. Because you have a set of root assumptions, namely the root assumptions of space and time in the three-dimensional world, and your brain holds such root assumptions, you cannot understand things that transcend this three-dimensional world. In order for you to understand, your dreams have undergone a partial translation and interpretation, translating only the small portion you can understand. So the dreams you can remember are only a very small part. Most of it you cannot remember — or rather, it is not that you cannot remember, but that you cannot understand it, so it simply cannot be presented to you.

When you think of the purpose of your existence, you think in terms of your daily waking life, but in these other dream dimensions, you are also working for your purposes.

That is, in dreams you also have your purposes. This is not your daily waking life; it is another kind of life.

And at that time you are communicating with other portions of your own entity.

The entity also has many other personalities, and many other experiences from past lives. These entities all exist simultaneously — if you understand the simultaneity of time, they all exist at the same time. Because in dreams you are not limited by three-dimensional time, so you are actually communicating with them.

Striving to do work that is as meaningful as what you do in your waking state.

That is, in dreams you are still striving to do work that is as meaningful as what you ordinarily do when awake.

Therefore, when I contact your reality, it is as if I were entering one of your dreams.

He uses this example as an analogy: just as you enter other people's realities in dreams, when he enters our three-dimensional space, it is as if he has entered our dream.

When I dictate this book through Jane Roberts, I am aware of myself, and I am also aware of myself within my own environment.

That is, when he is transmitting this book through Jane, he can perceive himself in his own reality — the self that has not entered our dream — and he can also perceive the portion of himself that he has sent out. That is to say, he sends out a portion of his consciousness to Jane, and Jane can perceive him. He projects a portion of his consciousness onto Jane's level, while he himself remains at his original level. It is not that he has come over entirely.

For example, when you write a letter to an old friend, you also send out a portion of your consciousness, and while you are writing you are still aware that you are sitting in this room.

He uses this example in the same way. When I am dictating, a portion of his consciousness still exists in his former reality space, but another portion already exists within this entranced woman. But he says, the information I send out is far more than the information you send out in your mind, and this analogy already comes very close to the real meaning.

As I mentioned earlier, my environment is not the environment of a person who has just died, as you think of it.

Later he will have some chapters specifically devoted to the process after death, explaining in great detail what happens after a person dies.

One of the great differences between your environment and mine is that you must materialize mental activity into physical form, whereas we understand the reality of mental activity, recognize their brilliant validity, and accept them as they are. Therefore we no longer need to materialize them first and then interpret them in such a rigid manner.

Here he touches on a core point: because we know that the essence of this world is composed of spirit, and spirit is an existence of a higher dimension. It is only after it intrudes into the three-dimensional world that we see an interpretation of it. In his environment, he knows this truth directly — that spirit itself is a real existence — so he does not need to materialize this spirit into a camouflage reality, like the three-dimensional world we see, and then use our physical senses to perceive and experience this spiritual substance. That would be like taking a huge detour, and in the end you still see something that is not real. But they do not need to do that; they directly interpret and understand the spirit itself, without needing to materialize the spirit into matter before understanding it.

I was very fond of your earth. Now I can focus my consciousness upon it, and if I wish, I can experience it as you do, but I can also perceive it in many ways that you cannot in this lifetime. Now, some readers will immediately and intuitively grasp what I am saying, because you have already suspected that you are viewing experience through richly colored but extremely distorted lenses.

But also remember that if physical reality is, broadly speaking, an illusion, it is an illusion caused by a greater reality, and this illusion itself has its own purpose and meaning.

What he means is that the three-dimensional world we speak of now is an illusion caused by a greater reality, and this greater reality is the world of spirit, the world of consciousness. Within the world of spirit, or psyche, or consciousness, this greater reality forms the illusion of our three-dimensional world, which is the physical world. But you must never think that this illusion itself is meaningless; it has its own purpose and meaning. Later we will explain where its purpose and meaning lie, rather than saying that because it is an illusion, we should ignore it and go straight for the things on the spiritual level.

Perhaps it is better to say this: physical reality is one form that reality takes.

If the true reality behind it has many forms, then physical reality is only one of those forms.

In your system, however, you focus very intensely upon one very small aspect of experience.

That is, in our cognition, we focus only on the level of physical reality, but in fact this reality has many forms.

We can travel freely through any number of such realities... and our present experience includes work done in each of these realities. I do not mean to belittle the importance of your present personality and physical existence. Quite the contrary.

He says he has been to many realities, and they have work to do in each reality, but he is not belittling our reality by saying that his reality is a level higher than ours; rather, he is emphasizing its importance.

Three-dimensional experience is an invaluable training ground.

Here he emphasizes another point: many people have asked me in the comments, since, as you say, we reincarnate, we are on the spiritual level, and there are higher dimensions, then why do we still come to earth to reincarnate? Why do we still need to go through this three-dimensional world? This three-dimensional world is not fun at all, and we cannot find any enjoyment in it. Seth says, three-dimensional experience is an invaluable training ground. Remember, he says "invaluable."

The personality you know, with its memories, will indeed endure, but it is only a part of your entire identity, just as your childhood in this life is an extremely important part of your present personality, even though you have long since grown far beyond a child.

He says that the existence of your personality in this three-dimensional world, the things you have experienced, the memories, the experiences, the emotions — all of these will endure, all will exist eternally. Everything you have experienced exists eternally. On the contrary, those material things — money, houses — once you die, they are gone. But your memories, emotions, and experiences will all exist eternally. And they are only a part of your identity, a part of your experience. For example, your childhood in this life is an extremely important part of your personality, and now you have grown up, and you understand far more and know far more than you did in childhood. In childhood you may have only moved within a very small range, basically just the yard or the kindergarten, but now your range of activity can extend across the whole world. So you will continue to grow and develop, and you will gradually come to know other environments, just as you once left the home of your childhood.

But environments are not objective things.

Just as we discussed in the previous chapter: environments are not objectively existing things, not a collection of objects independent of you. On the contrary, you create them, you create your environments, and they are extensions of yourselves, the materialization of mental activity extended outward from your consciousness. Here he mentions that you leave home and go into other environments, but what he wants to say is that this environment is not what you think it is — an external environment outside of you. Your environment is something extended outward from your own inner consciousness, a materialized display of mental activity. That is what an environment is.

I will tell you exactly how you create your environment, and I create mine according to the same laws, although you end up with physical matter and I do not.

They also create their environments, but the environments they create are not physical, while the environments we create are physical. The results are different, but the principle is the same.

Then he goes on to suggest that Ruburt change the position of the bed to a north-south orientation; it is currently east-west. But he has already made this suggestion many times, and even later they never changed it. This certainly involves some concepts of feng shui. Many people, when buying a house or when inside a room, often talk about feng shui issues. Later he will talk about these junction points, that is, the issue of energy junction points. Feng shui things do exist, but you should not talk too much about how this feng shui is this way or that way. However, the role and significance of feng shui are indeed considerable. You see, here Seth repeatedly emphasizes and suggests that Rob and Jane change the position of their bed from east-west to north-south, but in the end they never changed it. These two people are very stubborn; they did not believe in this, and they felt that changing the position of the bed did not matter. In fact, if Jane and Rob had been Easterners, they probably would have changed it immediately — when a being from a higher dimension gives you such advice, you should hurry up and listen. They did not listen, and this is also a point where Western thinking differs greatly from Eastern thinking.

Session 520

Seth said:

Your scientists have finally learned what philosophers have known for generations, that "mind" influences "matter."

You still need to discover the fact that mind creates and forms matter.

That is to say, our very first surrounding environment is our body. He just said earlier that your environment is composed of the spiritual extensions of your inner psyche. It is not a shell like that anatomical model in which you are imprisoned, enclosing you inside.

The beauty or ugliness of your body, health or disability, agility or slowness, is not imposed on you without choice at birth. On the contrary:

Your body shape and the personal environment you possess are the material concretization of your own thoughts, feelings, and interpretations.

That is to say, the shape of your body, your image, is something you can decide yourself. It is not imposed on you at birth. At birth you choose a basic mold, or a general emotional temperament, but you also have the right to choose and change it later in life.

The inner self magically transforms thoughts and feelings into material counterparts.

As we said earlier, your body is basically formed by the inner self. Thus the physical body is formed, and it is you who cultivate it:

Its condition fully reflects your subjective state at any given time.

Your physical body fully reflects your subjective state at any given time; it is a reflection of your subjective state.

You build your physical body with atoms and molecules, forming basic elements into a shape you call yourself.

Our body is composed of basic elements; there is no need to deny this. According to scientists, it is formed by the combination of basic molecules, atoms, cells, and organs.

You intuitively know that you form your own image, and that it is independent of you.

We certainly feel the body grows by ourselves; of course after our parents gave birth to us, everything afterward is your own doing. But you do not know:

By pushing your thoughts and feelings into matter, breaking through into three-dimensional life, you create your larger environment as the physical world you know.

Therefore the ego, individually and collectively, sends out its psychic energy, forming tentacles that merge into form.

The meaning here is that your inner energy not only creates your physical body -- that is, the inner self forms your physical body -- but also breaks outward into a three-dimensional life, and also creates the environment around you and the physical world you know; all of it is created by your inner energy. He uses a vivid metaphor: like tentacles, it sends out tentacle-energy, which finally merges into form.

Every feeling and thought has its own electromagnetic reality, completely unique.

Every feeling and thought is unique, completely different from others. Its electromagnetic frequency is also different; you can understand it as differing in frequency, phase, amplitude, and intensity. It is naturally capable, according to the various intensities you wish to include:

of combining with certain other feelings and thoughts.

In a certain way, the way three-dimensional objects are formed is somewhat like the way images are formed on your television screen, but there is a great difference between the two, and if you are not tuned to that particular frequency, you will not see the object at all.

What this passage means is that your feelings and thoughts all have their own unique electromagnetic reality, and it is one of a kind. This electromagnetic reality, because it is itself your feelings and thoughts, is inner, and it has an outer reality as well, which is the electromagnetic reality. Every feeling and thought has an electromagnetic reality, and this reality can also combine with other feelings and thoughts; after such combination it forms something new. This continuous forming of new things is like the superposition of signals on a television screen -- after radio signals and electromagnetic waves are transmitted, the television receives them and regenerates the image on the screen. He says it is similar to this, but you must tune to that frequency; if the frequency is wrong, you cannot see the existence of that object, meaning you cannot perceive its existence.

Each of you unconsciously plays the role of a transformer, automatically converting very complex and refined electromagnetic units into physical objects.

You are now in the center of this dense material system, surrounded by weaker regions, and in those regions what you might call pseudo-matter still continues to exist.

Every thought and feeling spontaneously exists with a single complex electromagnetic unit, which, by the way, has not yet been perceived by your scientists.

This part may be harder to understand. What is he saying? Each of us is actually like a transformer, able to automatically turn the electromagnetic reality of those feelings and thoughts just mentioned into physical objects, forming these electromagnetic units into physical objects. And we are right in the central zone of dense matter, with many things around us that we think are not matter continuing to exist, but we cannot recognize them. And every thought and feeling spontaneously exists as a single and complex electromagnetic unit.

Here, he uses EE units to represent this electromagnetic unit. We will not expand on this for now; let me briefly explain: in Seth's The "Unknown" Reality, he introduces the basic units that compose this world, called units of consciousness (CUs). Roughly several million or tens of millions of units of consciousness form one EE unit, that is, this electromagnetic energy unit, or what may be called an emotional energy unit. There may be some discrepancies in translation; at the time Rob may have made an error while recording these words, because what Seth said was a kind of emotional energy unit, but Rob recorded it as an electromagnetic unit. In his later books there are corrections and revisions. We can understand it as the same whatever it is called; using emotional units is somewhat more reasonable, because using electromagnetic does not carry the emotional element.

This EE unit is not without consciousness, because what composes this unit is essentially composed of units of consciousness, and each unit of consciousness is conscious. Similar units of consciousness gather together to form a materialized unit. But we cannot see units of consciousness; in our physical world we cannot observe their existence -- they do not exist in material form at all, but exist in the form of consciousness. The only smallest unit we can observe in the physical world, in the three-dimensional world, is this EE unit, that is, the unit of emotional energy, or emotional entity unit, which is the smallest entity unit. We turn a consciousness into an emotional unit, and emotional units compose the physical world we can see.

The smallest strings in superstring theory that we now understand are somewhat like this energy unit, somewhat close to it -- it is a vibration of very high frequency. But our quantum mechanics and science have one greatest threshold they cannot cross. Where are they stuck? They believe that in this world, apart from humans or apart from life, the physical world has no consciousness; this is the biggest sticking point. Because they do not think other things in the world have consciousness, they cannot understand many behaviors at the microscopic level or in quantum states. In fact, all things in this world are conscious; this world is composed of units of consciousness, and what is manifested is energy units -- that is, EE emotional units or electromagnetic units. We use EE for simplicity, because it is less likely to cause ambiguity.

At the level of consciousness, we can understand the speed of this EE unit in this way -- if we insist on reasoning with material logic, its speed of movement far exceeds the speed of light, not limited by the speed of light at all; we do not know how many times the speed of light, hundreds, thousands, or even hundreds of millions of times faster it operates, and we cannot see or perceive its existence at all. But when it reaches the material level, when it becomes an energy unit, its speed slows down; only when it slows to near the speed of light or below the speed of light can we humans perceive its existence.

So we often say in superstring theory that the vibrational frequency of these strings exceeds the speed of light. Although nothing in the physical world can exceed the speed of light, do not forget that these strings exist in eleven-dimensional space, with four spatial dimensions, six curled-up dimensions¹⁰, and so on. Within these tiny curled-up spaces, within the space of Planck length¹¹, the vibrational frequency of these strings exceeds the speed of light. In fact, within the current scope of scientists' understanding, they have begun to approach the essence of material reality, but there is still a great gap -- fundamentally there is a cognitive error: they think these things are all lifeless, that atoms and molecules are lifeless, and that only humans, animals, plants, bacteria, and such living things are alive. This is actually very narrow.

Humans cannot look at the world through dualistic oppositions; if one uses dualistic opposition, that in itself is mistaken. Since you acknowledge that humans have consciousness, if you treat humans as a special object of existence, then human consciousness becomes like something accidentally evolved by nature -- suddenly one kind of organism produced consciousness, while other things have no consciousness. This is clearly wrong. Since humans have consciousness, other things also have consciousness; this is a very plain truth. But people are unwilling to admit this, and unwilling to believe it, because there is no way to verify it, so they cannot explore consciousness, and the direction of research is wrong. Here you just need to know this roughly; I have said a few extra words. This is some later knowledge and content, and he will explain it in detail later; we will not expand on it here.

The electromagnetic intensity of a thought or feeling determines the strength and permanence of the image to be materialized into matter.

This is very interesting. How long matter can exist in the future is determined by its intensity -- what intensity? The electromagnetic intensity of thoughts and feelings.

In my own material, I have explained this point in detail; here I only want you to understand that the world you know is reflected from an inner reality.

Basically you are composed of the same ingredients as chairs, stones, lettuce, and birds.

This is certain. The physical world has only a little over a hundred elements, roughly one hundred twenty or thirty elements¹², which repeatedly combine to form the vast universe we now know.

In a vast cooperative effort, all consciousness together forms the images you know.

Now, because this point is known to us, we can still change our environment and our physical image at will without causing confusion, because we perceive what lies behind them.

Here he repeatedly emphasizes this point: the reality we see is composed of the combined force of consciousness, not just a single consciousness. For example, if you see this thing as a cup, then I also see it as a cup. Many people say consciousness creates reality; then is the cup in your mind and the cup in my mind the same cup? I can say it both is a cup and is not a cup. Because everyone agrees it is the same physical cup, if someone hands you a cup of water, how do you know this cup is the same cup? Can it be used to hold water for drinking? So this is not a problem. But how is the cognition of this cup created by our consciousness? It is not decided by our individual consciousness alone, but by the combined force of group consciousness and the whole consciousness.

From ancient times, from the most primitive times, our cognition of the physical world has come step by step. Cognition of heaven and earth and all things in the world -- we gained cognition of stone, cognition of sand. We know that a cup is made of glass, and that a cup is made from silicon dioxide in sand turned into a glass body through high temperature. In this process, people's understanding of sand, understanding of fire, understanding of such things, the earliest and most primitive understandings were all a basic common understanding, and this common understanding gradually evolved -- that is, consciousness superimposed on consciousness, thought superimposed on thought, and this mutual evolution of consciousness formed a common opinion. If you have a basic understanding of sand, a common understanding that sand becomes a glass-like thing after high temperature, an understanding of pouring this thing into a mold, and a common understanding that the mold produces a cup -- after such a long process of human experience, the combined force of a common consciousness forms the world you have now. So this world has commonality; the things you see and the things I see are basically the same. But this can only be said to be basically the same, not completely the same. Because every person's emotions, feelings, and energy are different, the matter he sees, forms, or perceives is not completely the same either. Some people see a cup and find it so likable, so beautiful, so lovely and sparkling; some people think the cup is very ugly, or has no distinguishing feature at all -- completely different feelings. Each person's perception of the same object is completely different, but generally the same. We will not expand on this.

From your perspective, we can be in several places at the same time, and we can apprehend the true motives of consciousness.

And whenever you think of another person with feeling, you send out a counterpart of yourself, whose intensity is below matter, but which is nevertheless a definite image.

Here the meaning is that when you think of someone with feeling, you send out this image of yourself, sending it to that person's side. But the intensity of this image is insufficient; it is below matter -- to form something material, it cannot be decided by your single consciousness alone; it requires the combined force of many, many consciousnesses. The longing you form does not have enough energy and intensity to form matter, so you only send out an image. But from Seth's perspective, this image is indeed definite; from our human perspective, there is no such image at all. You yourself do not know it; when you send it out, it completely avoids the attention of your own ego consciousness.

When I think of someone with feeling, I do the same thing.

When Seth thinks of someone, he also sends out an image. But where is he different from us? He not only sends out this image, but also places a part of his consciousness within that image, and can communicate with people -- this part of consciousness placed within that image can go chat, speak, and communicate with others. This is what I also discussed in an earlier chapter: a mind-projected body; Buddhism has long spoken of this kind of thing. If you can see it, it is sending out a projection through a single thought.

Environment is mainly created by the spiritual nature of consciousness.

He has repeatedly said this many times; please do not find it long-winded. When Seth speaks, he may say many seemingly repetitive things on many subjects, but each repetition, each passage, has its own inner reason and has something he wants to explain. In fact, if you read Buddhist scriptures, many passages are also actually repetitive; they often repeatedly speak of the same thing in different ways and from different angles, but it is actually the same thing. Seth is like this too.

Pushing outward, it forms many forms. Suppose I have a favorite fourteenth-century study; I am very satisfied with it. In your physical terms, it does not exist, and I know very well that it is my mental product, yet I enjoy it greatly.

And I often adopt a concrete image so that I can sit at the desk and look out the window at the countryside scenery.

This is him describing his own living state. He imagines a fourteenth-century study, likes it very much, often sits at the desk, forms himself into a concrete image, and then sits at the desk looking at the scenery outside.

When you sit in your living room and look outside, you are doing the same thing, but you do not understand what you are doing.

This sentence is also very profound. When you sit in the living room and look out, it is the same as Seth imagining this study in his mind and then sitting in the imagined study looking out, but we do not know that the essence in between is the same.

At present you are somewhat restricted. When I meet with my colleagues, I often translate our thoughts into different images and shapes, purely for the pleasure of doing so.

We have what you would call a game, a game requiring certain specialized skills, in which we see which of us can translate a certain thought into the greatest number of images, just for entertainment.

This whole chapter and the previous one are about their world, what their living state is like, and what they usually do. He says that among colleagues they also play some games; this game is turning a certain thought into an image and seeing who can transform it into the greatest variety of images, carrying on a game and contest for entertainment.

There are such subtle qualities, such different levels of feeling affecting the nature of all thoughts, that no single thought is exactly the same.

There is no need to explain this; your feelings, the changes of your psyche, and your thoughts are all extremely subtle, and no one is exactly the same; this is certain.

Incidentally, in your system, no physical object is a completely identical copy of another.

This is also true. Even if you produce cups that look exactly alike, in essence they are not the same; the atoms and molecules composing them are different, with their own essential attributes and their own essence, which colors and modifies any image they form. I remember watching a satellite TV program: a person could find, among five hundred identical cups of water, the one he had looked at. He first looked at one cup of water, put it back, placed it randomly in a location he did not know at all, then came back and found the cup he had looked at from among five hundred identical cups of clear water. This is quite amazing -- you think they are the same, but actually they are not.

When you perceive any object, you accept the perception and concentrate on its continuity and similarity.

In a very important way, you block out and ignore the differences within a given field of reality.

When we perceive objects, for example, if a hundred cups are placed in front of us, we basically only accept their continuity and similarity, thinking that these hundred cups are exactly the same, and we basically block out and ignore the minute differences among them, not considering them.

Therefore you have a highly discriminating mind; you accept certain qualities and ignore another side.

We only accept the part we can perceive; a cup is just a cup, and if there are some special changes in this cup, we cannot feel them and directly ignore them.

For example, your body not only changes completely every seven years, but changes constantly with every breath.

In seven years all the cells of our body are replaced; it seems someone has studied this -- completely replaced from head to toe, with not one cell exactly the same as seven years before. But he is saying that your body does not change only once every seven years; it is changing at every moment.

Within the flesh, molecules and atoms are constantly dying and renewing; hormones are in a state of constant motion and change; the electromagnetic properties of skin and cells continuously jump and alter, and even reverse themselves.

Sometimes cells reverse; this is normal. Sometimes when cells reverse, they become cancer cells.

The matter composing your body in one instant and the things forming your body in this moment are different in important ways.

Because its electromagnetic nature itself is changing, even cells that look the same may no longer be the same.

You pay a great deal of attention to the seeming permanence of your body.

This is very normal; we all hope our body will never break down.

If you perceived the constant, continuous changes within your body with the same persistent attitude, then you would be astonished that you ever thought the body was a more or less constant, cohesive entity.

His meaning is that if you pay special attention to the permanence and unchanging nature of your body, and if you use the same persistent attitude to examine and perceive the changes occurring in your body at every moment, you will be very surprised -- would you still think your body is a more or less constant, cohesive entity? No, because you cannot confirm that this body and the body of the previous second are the same body; you cannot find which one is the real body of yours, because it is always changing.

Even on the subjective side, you do know a relatively stable, relatively eternal concept of the conscious self, and you focus your attention on it.

On the subjective level, on the level of thought, you also create a relatively stable, relatively eternal conscious self; you have a concept of yourself within this ego consciousness, and then you focus your energy on it. You emphasize those concepts, thoughts, and attitudes that you recall from past experience, treating them as yourself, while wholly ignoring those that were once unique or have now disappeared.

You also ignore the fact that you cannot hold on to thoughts; in your terms, the previous thought has vanished without a trace.

This part is very profound and has a metaphysical flavor. You have created a -- not only are you physically changeable and changing at every moment, the same is true on the mental level. But you do not think so; you think the physical body is basically more or less constant, and although it ages, within a certain period you think it is unchanging -- today's you and tomorrow's you are the same; when you wake up, you are still the you of yesterday, but actually they are not the same; everything has changed.

On the mental level, you establish another subjective ideology, treating it as unchanging, and then focus your energy on it. You emphasize those concepts, thoughts, and attitudes that you recall from what you have experienced -- he adds quotation marks around the word "past"; actually there is no past, but you regard as past -- those beliefs, values, and systems you have accumulated since childhood. Your views of right and wrong and your worldview are all things from your past experience, and you treat these things as yourself. At the same time, you deny those things you cannot see at all, have ignored, or that have disappeared -- for example, the thought from the previous second, the previous thought; you think it has vanished without a trace and no longer exists. You only value the thoughts you think can be fixed and the beliefs that have become definite.

You try to maintain a constant, relatively permanent, physical and subjective self.

He is very clear: we try to maintain a constant, relatively permanent, physical and subjective self -- both material and subjective -- in order to maintain a fairly unchanging, relatively permanent environment.

Therefore you are always in a position of ignoring such changes.

We never want to see change, nor do we want to see changes in the environment or in ourselves around us; we all want to think it is stable. We are actually afraid of change.

The very things you refuse to acknowledge are exactly what could give you a much deeper understanding of the true nature of reality, of personal subjectivity, and of the physical environment that seems to surround you.

The things you ignore and consider unimportant are exactly what can give you a deeper understanding of the nature of reality, personal subjectivity, and the objective environment you think exists around you.

After a thought leaves your conscious mind, what happens to it? Where does your thought go? It does not simply disappear. You can learn to follow it; you can follow your thoughts -- this is also something to practice in spiritual cultivation, in Buddhism, or in other forms of meditation: following your thoughts.

But you are often very afraid to move the focus of your attention away from three-dimensional existence.

We often dare not, and often are unwilling to follow our own thoughts, because this thought has already arisen and was not produced by present sensory stimulation, so you are unwilling to chase after it. Therefore thoughts seem to disappear, because you fix your attention on what is happening now and on what the sensory stimuli before your eyes bring you at every moment, and you are unwilling to pursue the purely conscious things that have already passed and that, for you, have already happened.

At the same time, your subjectivity seems to have a mysterious and unknowable quality; even your mental life has a hidden point of falling, a subjective cliff.

Within your inner being, on the mental level, you have set a very hidden falling point, a cliff, that you yourself may not normally know about. What is the subjective cliff? It is the place where your thoughts and memories tumble over and fall downward, disappearing without a trace, falling into nothingness.

To protect yourself, to protect your subjectivity from flowing away, at this dangerous place you have assumed, you have erected many danger signs.

Within this cliff you have erected many danger signs, saying: do not approach, do not look ahead, do not go there, stay far away from this cliff, do not go there at all.

The thoughts you lose, or the memories you forget, the things you cannot recall, you can imagine them as having fallen off this cliff, fallen into the void. You can actually trace those thoughts. You only need to focus your consciousness on them, climb over the cliff and jump down, and you can find these things. But you do not dare, because you are afraid that if your subjective self follows these past thoughts down, you will not be able to come back, and you will also become part of the void. In order not to do this, on your own mental level, in your mental world, you have set up many very strong markers and symbols, like those big warning signs in real life that say danger, do not approach. You set up these signs very far away, and you may even have put up barbed wire and railings to keep you from approaching the place where these lost things are.

Your subjective reality, besides moving in the direction of time toward physical reality, can also move in another direction: you can turn back and go the other way. You can follow the constant stimulation of your present physical senses in the present moment, and keep chasing after those thoughts with them. Or you can set them aside for the moment, turn around, and look at where your previous thought, your previous idea, went. If you can trace the previous thought, you can recognize the essence of this matter, the reality of this world, and you can transcend time. If you use this angle, using your subjective self to keep pursuing past thoughts, you can leap beyond the limitations of present time.

Your thoughts seem to disappear through these subjective openings, but in fact these openings are like the revolving surface of the psyche.

Here again the revolving surface of the psyche is mentioned. When Jane communicated with Seth, she used this kind of revolving surface of the psyche. It is a larger spatial range of the psyche, connecting the self you know with other universes of experience. In those realities, symbols come alive, and the potential of thought is not denied.

You think your thoughts disappear through these openings, but in fact these openings are precisely the revolving surface of your psyche. This gap, this space below the cliff, is precisely the place where you come into contact with other realities and universes. In that place, the potential of thought is recognized and not denied, and symbols come alive. This is actually the same as what happens when we sit in meditation, practice, or contemplate. We often need to cut off thoughts and enter a state where there are no ideas at all, which is actually similar to entering this subjective cliff and jumping down from it. It is not your body that jumps down, but your thoughts that jump down, and your subjective self jumps down with them. Only after jumping down can you perceive contact with other realities.

In your dreams, there is communication between these other realities and your own, and there is constant, ongoing interaction between the two.

If there is any point where your own consciousness seems to dodge you or flee from you, or if there is any point where your consciousness seems to end, then these are the places where you have built psychic and psychological barriers, and these are precisely the areas you should explore.

He makes a very core point: in dreams, there is communication between your own reality and other realities, and they constantly interact. Whether in dreams or in waking life, though more often in dreams, if there is any point where your consciousness seems to evade or dodge you, very often when we reach a certain point we stop thinking about it, avoid it, and do not think further into it, that is the kind of point where your consciousness is evading, or if there is a point where your consciousness is interrupted when you reach it, where you cannot continue thinking, where you trace back and back to this thought and finally do not know where the idea came from, and consciousness seems to end, then these are the places where you yourself have built psychological and psychic barriers. And these places are precisely where you should explore and study. As long as you explore and study them, you can walk out of the enclosure of consciousness within your skull, transcend its barriers, break through the things that enclose you, and enter a higher level.

Every forgotten thought or lost memory represents at least a small death, but that is not the fact.

You think that lost thoughts or forgotten memories are like things that are gone and will never come back, like death, never to return. No, they are all still there.

Chapter Summary

Through the content of three sessions, he described their world to us. Like the previous chapter, his focus is not on describing their world — describing their world does not have much practical meaning for us — rather, he points out the similarities and differences between their world and ours, letting us view their world by understanding it: their environment, their matter, their outward appearance, including their control of thought, their recognition of time, and so on. Through their own recognition of their reality, he teaches us and inspires us: can we consider the question from another angle regarding our own recognition of the reality around us? Instead of using the physical senses we most commonly use, or the only ones we can recognize, to perceive. Can we think and consider from some other angle?

注释与核实

1. Source: Wikipedia, "Battle of Wuzhang Plains" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battle_of_Wuzhang_Plains) ↩

2. According to Mike's original words, it was "the original title of Dante's Divine Comedy"; upon verification, it should be "the original title Dante gave to this long poem was simply Commedia (Comedy), not Divina Commedia; 'Divina' (Divine) was added by later generations, with Boccaccio being the first to call it that, and it was not until the 1555 Venice edition that La Divina Commedia first appeared on the title page." (Source: Encyclopædia Britannica, "The Divine Comedy" entry, https://www.britannica.com/topic/The-Divine-Comedy) ↩

3. This claim could not be verified. ↩

4. Source: John Clute et al., The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, "Roberts, Jane" entry (https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/roberts_jane) ↩

5. Source: The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction (SFE), "Milford Science Fiction Writers' Conference" entry (https://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/milford_science_fiction_writers_conference) ↩

6. This claim could not be verified. ↩

7. According to Mike's original words, it was "if you compare the Earth to an atom, then the size of the nucleus would be equivalent to a basketball."; upon verification, it should be "the ratio of the size of the atomic nucleus to the atom is about one hundred-thousandth (about 1/27000 to 1/60000 in diameter), so when an atom is enlarged to the size of the Earth, the nucleus would be about several hundred meters wide, equivalent to a stadium, not a basketball." (Source: Encyclopædia Britannica, "Atom", https://www.britannica.com/science/atom) ↩

8. According to Mike's original words, it was "real matter only occupies one-thousandth of it, a range of 0.01%, and the remaining 99.99% is empty"; upon verification, it should be "the diameter of the atomic nucleus is about one hundred-thousandth of the atom, and its volume occupies only about 10^-15 (one quadrillionth) of the atom, so the 'emptiness' of the atom is far more than 99.99%, but about 99.9999999999999%." (Source: Encyclopædia Britannica, "Atom", https://www.britannica.com/science/atom) ↩

9. According to Mike's original words, it was "the strings in superstring theory are a kind of energy segment, which itself has no matter at all, not even physicality."; upon verification, it should be "the strings in superstring theory are one-dimensional energy filaments about 10⁻³³ centimeters in length; they are precisely the fundamental building blocks of matter—particles such as electrons and quarks are the result of strings vibrating in different modes, and the mass and charge of particles are determined by the mode of vibration, rather than 'having no materiality, no physicality'." (Source: Encyclopædia Britannica, "String theory: Dimensions and vibrations", https://www.britannica.com/science/string-theory/Dimensions-and-vibrations) ↩

10. Source: Mathematical Institute, University of Oxford, "Calabi-Yau Manifolds and Particle Physics" (https://www.maths.ox.ac.uk/groups/mathematical-physics/research-areas/calabi-yau-manifolds-and-particle-physics) ↩

11. This claim could not be verified. ↩

12. This claim could not be verified. ↩