Persons

It's always useful to remember that Seth (joyfully) accepted the challenge of presenting his material in a particular time and place (late 20th century America) and through a particular set of circumstances (Jane and Rob). This "colors" the material. For instance, in late 20th century America any new idea, especially a weird one, needed to have some kind of scientific feel in order to be taken at all seriously. (This over-leaning towards science also provoked it's opposite twin, fundamentalism, but that's a whole different post).

In this post I'm thinking specifically about Seth's "consciousness units" (CU) and "electromagnetic energy units" (EEU). In a different, more animistic setting he might have described these as elemental persons (person = embodied desire). Neither of these is more or less true. They're just different in the same way that an idea can be presented in sculpture or painting or music. As persons, these elementals can be understood as enthusiastically following their desires to combine in rich and complex ways. In general, this view point makes the world a more personable place.

All that said, I have a confession. Many times over the years I've thought that I'd found a better way to express something Seth said. Invariably, as my understanding grew deeper, I've discovered that Seth was ahead of me and his expression was more fertile than mine. I've no reason to doubt that this is yet another of those cases.

Dreaming

Early in my encounter with the Seth material I vaguely noticed that Seth talked a lot about dreams. A little later I noticed that Seth talked a lot about dreams and this made me impatient. "Yeah, yeah, dreams are interesting but I want to get on with the real business of controlling my day to day reality." Quite a while later I actually applied myself to remembering and understanding my dreams. This provided some interesting insights and was fun. Still later I got to the point where, occasionally, I would know I was dreaming while I was asleep. That was really fun, a sort of poor man's version of the Master Player control I thought the Seth material would give me in waking life. It's only been the last few years that I've finally understood what Seth was driving at. All of the above was really just preamble to the brass ring of realizing that I'm dreaming when I'm awake.

A Seth Master

Would you recognize a Seth Master if you met one? Would they be fabulously wealthy? Perfectly healthy? If they were a vet would they heal sick puppies by just passing their hands over them? This is a very interesting question and the answer reveals a lot about what we think Seth's ideas mean. To my knowledge, no one's taken a swing at this except Richard Bach in his novel Illusions.

When most of us first encounter "you create your reality" we think that, if we can just figure it out, we'll become what James Carse called a "Master Player" in his book, Finite and Infinite Games. It's the possibility of absolute control and absolute predictability. But, is that what YCYR promises? How would that work in a world where spontaneity always operates and time is basically meaningless? Would a Seth Master always be happy and problem free or is sadness, longing, anger and all the other staples of human life part of the good of the world?

This is a question well worth thinking about. After you get over the initial notion of absolute control watch what happens next. My guess is you'll end up at something like, "Well, of course I'll always have problems, just not these problems." Really? It's fascinating that we almost always think that our current problems aren't the best or appropriate problems for us to have.

I'm sure you get the drift of this by now. Happy cogitating!

Starting Over

Despite all evidence to the contrary, I know at least a couple of people have looked at this blog. Not that it has any mysterious Sethmagnetic properties. I shamelessly promoted it on the new Seth Network International (SNI). In response I got gracious emails from Linda and Michael at SNI. I responded to Linda, reiterating my pugnatious stance about experimenting with Seth's ideas. She wrote back and thought disagreed with me. As "luck" would have it, I was then away from the computer for several days which gave me time to reflect as opposed to blabbing back immediately.
I am a science guy and I did spend close to twenty years getting Seth and Science to fit somewhat comfortably together. But, I also use the science/empiricist approach to inoculate myself against true believers. It's probably a failing of mine that I'm very, very impatient with folks who won't pursue basic, hard questions. Nevertheless, my first posts were lazy. So, I'm starting over. Still, in some way it just doesn't seem fair to erase the earlier posts. They're also a record and deserve their time in the sun.
Here's the best I've got...
After the first blush of the Seth material wore off the question that haunted me most was, "Is it true?" For something like twenty-five years that seemed like a perfectly reasonable question. But, that question can't finally be answered from a science perspective. Any test that we might conduct can always go awry because our understanding is imperfect or because Seth's ideas are wrong. There's no way to tell the difference. Over the course of the last few years I've come to a very different understanding. It's not easy to explain but here goes. Let's ask a different question, "Is Impressionism true?" I think everyone can sense that there's something goofy about that question. I believe that the Seth material and Impressionism are frameworks for creativity. Christianity was a creative framework for Bach, European history for Shakespeare, and Science for Einstein. It goes deeper than that. The roles we choose in life - mother, father, ballerina, astronaut, blogger - these too, are creative frameworks. Creative frameworks aren't distinguished by relative truth or falsity. Einstein's science was no truer than Bach's Christianity or Shakespeare's history. The differences lie in the kinds of opportunities for creativity they offer.
Now to Linda's specific disagreement. She said she didn't think the Seth material could ever fail or that we could ever fail with it. Imagine I decide to paint an Impressionist portrait of my granddaughter. Can either I or Impressionism fail in that endeavor? Not exactly. That's the same kind of goofy question. Surely, just painting the picture is valuable (or value fulfillment). But, I can fail to take advantage of the creative opportunities that Impressionism gives me to express my love, to hint at the fleeting nature of one earth life, to somehow real-ize the light-made-flesh nature of my granddaughter. I'm not sure how to express it but some pictures turn out "better" than others. There are differences between artistic endeavors but there are probably more fertile ways to identify the poles of those differences than "success" and "failure".
Two final things. If you're lonely, poor, or sick I imagine this seems like so much hot air. In future posts I'll try to show how, in fact, this approach can help you change how you feel. Finally, "Thanks, Linda!" for the whack upside the head.

Youth and Seth/Jane Roberts

The new SNI asks the question, "Where are the youthful Seth/Jane Roberts readers?" I think that's a very complex question and perhaps we'll explore some of its facets in a later post. As a beginning it's worth "answering" that question with some others.

- Where are the Seth movies, YouTube videos and Podcasts? We're not thinking of boring old talking head geezers here but something with a little mojo.

- Where are the Seth Photoshop creations and Flash animations?

- Where are the Seth short stories and poems?

Times have changed. We are, by and large, people of the screen now rather than people of the book. Kevin Kelly, Becoming Screen Literate Can you blame the youth? Who wants to read some musty old geezer writing that's been around for forty years when the people selling this snake oil seem pretty much like everyone else?

The youthful Seth/Jane Roberts readers are missing because we've been oh so timidly imaginative about using Seth's material.

Limitations as Tools

We're generally very unimaginative when it comes to limitations. I've seen a lot of books and heard a lot of talk about removing all limitations. This is crazy. No limitations = no life on Earth. We act as if limitations are inherently permanent and always bad. Limitations are tools, an artist's tool. We accept them in order to create something that only those limitations can make possible. Monet accepted the limitations of paint, brushes and canvas. Without that acceptance we'd never have the Water Lillies or Expression Sunrise. Bach accepted the limitations of sounds and musical instruments. Einstein accepted math and empiricism. Don't get the idea that those guys had cool tools but that being over-weight or lonely or poor are somehow bad tools. Every limitation holds the seeds of great creativity. The trick is whether we use those tools consciously or not.

Trusting Seth

Believing Seth is one thing. Trusting Seth is a whole other thing. As mentioned in a previous post, we spend a fair amount of time investing. Curiously, this is one place where Seth's ideas (or ideas like his) have made very little penetration. We're not counting any of the "Gospel of Wealth" type ideas. They may or may not work. What we're thinking about here are people who already have money to invest. Let's say a bottom number of $100,000. While these folks may believe Seth's ideas (we've never come across anyone who said so) there's absolutely no evidence that any of them trust Seth's ideas. Why is that?

Seth and Science

The Seth community, at least the part that I've known, has always had a strange and ambivalent relationship with science. One the one hand, there have been numerous attempts to link Seth's ideas to the ideas of Quantum Mechanics. That seems to be a fruitful line to pursue. Deep in quantum mechanics things get pretty weird and seem very Seth-like. I was just reading an article the other day called "Reality Tests" from Seed magazine about how the Institut für Quantenoptik und Quanteninformation (IQOQI, pronounced “ee-ko-kee”) tested the basic tenets of realism and found them wanting.

We want to build a link to quantum mechanics precisely because that will lend legitimacy to Seth's ideas. Quantum mechanics is the most tested and most successful scientific theory ever developed. How did we get quantum mechanics? Via a deep trust in, and allegiance to, the scientific method. Make an hypothesis, design an experiment to test it, do the experiment, record the results, then be ruthlessly honest about whether the results support the hypothesis. And, make sure that your hypothesis is falsifiable. There has to be some conceivable experiment that you could do that would prove the hypothesis wrong.

One of the things I've noticed is that most Seth folks just aren't willing to put Seth's ideas to that kind of test. All of a sudden science is too confining and too linear. The implication is that there's actually something wrong with trying to get reproducible results out of Seth's ideas. I think this timidity has held back our understanding of YCYR. We have to have a lot more courage than we've shown so far. Personally, about 90% of my Seth experiments have been busts. I freely admit that. But, I've learned so much from them.

I'll have a lot more to say about this as time goes on.

How and Why

How folks get sick is the same for everyone. This is the stuff that modern medicine knows so much about. Cells, genes, germs and viruses. Why people get sick is different for everyone. This is what we know almost nothing about. Hope, fear, desire, love, guilt - we know almost nothing of the rhythm and flow of these things.

Where's Seth?

It's been 35 years since I discovered Seth. It's closing in on 50 since Jane and Rob started the whole thing. I don't know about you, but I figured to be living in a more "Sethic" world by now. What happened? I imagine the answer to that is anything but simple. Here are a couple of things I've been thinking about lately.

The idea that we create our own realities is radical. No question. Still, I don't think we ever realized just how radical Seth's ideas were and how much they went against the grain of ordinary common sense. Take our legal system for instance. A wholesale adoption of Seth's ideas would put it out of business. How could we try anyone for a bad act when the "victim" agreed to participate? If the legal system went away would that mean brutal chaos, a society where the thugs and bullies were the winners? Our assumptions and beliefs about human nature run awfully deep.

Then there's the idea of probabilities. Among other things, I'm an investor. The market came a cropper in 2008 (we were mostly in cash then rode oil and gold back up in 2009 so no harm done). But wait, that's the probability I experienced. There are, surely, others in which Lehman didn't fail, folks didn't go crazy with over-leveraged CDOs. In fact, there must be other probabilities which other versions of me experience that are not marked by the worldwide cultural circumstances I'm experiencing - an increasingly polarized world, the ongoing Middle East powder keg, the deadening aspects of statistics, etc.

So, it seems the deepest question must be something like, "Why am I experiencing this particular reality?"