My Best Longterm Education

I have had one main source for my spiritual education and it was found in a few books by the same author. Everything else was grazing articles and books and the greatest teacher: life.

That first book was Seth Speaks. It led to more Seth books over the years, as I eased into the very thick and cerebral material. I found the books useful because they were describing things I had already thought about or experienced so they felt familiar, and prescient, too. Unlike most writings that were said to have been channelled, the Seth books never dipped into dogma, instead they stressed that the divine was within and that the individual should rely on themselves when considering spiritual principles and work. Many beliefs, he explained, were limiting. Many were based on distorted principles handed down through the generations in some cases.

As the decades rolled on, the books haven’t just held up, new experiences have revealed other teachings to have been amazingly on point, sometimes decades later.

Seth is very cerebral, and it often takes multiple read-throughs to get the full range of comprehension. I’m not a fan of trance channels, because so much of it strikes me as contrived or soaked in dogma. It isn’t to say those psychics are wrong, but their teachings appear distorted with notions being put forward that often tow the line of a consensus reality which I had often found suspect as a result of my own experience. A lot was trying to muscle its way through my awareness even then, much of which I would find mirrored in the material that Jane, as Seth, brought forward. Okay, so to be fair, Seth talks about life after life and how we create our reality, ideas that strike some people as strange, too, so there is that.

The work is worth the reflection and the level of self reliance that is inspired by the books even before the content is even considered.

Jane Roberts and her husband Robert Butts were both involved in helping to bring the Seth material forward. It began in the mid 1960’s when Jane, who was an author, decided to write a nonfiction book entitled Improving Your ESP Powers. They tried exercises throughout to determine which ones worked and which ones didn’t. At one point in their process, they used a Ouija board and Jane found that she was anticipating the answers before they came. Jane didn’t know what to think. The personality that came through was named Seth and he would say things that were complex, nuanced, and struck the two of them as curious. Were they making it all up? Then, around the same time, while sitting writing, Jane felt as though she had suddenly tumbled down a dimensional rabbit hole. Her account which is in the first chapter of The Seth Material describes it in her own words:

It was a lovely Autumn evening. After supper, I sat down at my old table in the living room, as I always do to work on my poetry, Rob was painting in the back Studio, three rooms away. I took out my pen and paper and settled down with my 9th or 10th cup of coffee for the day and my cigarettes. Willie, our cat dosed on the blue rug.

What happened Next was like a “trip” without drugs. If someone had slipped me an LSD Cube on the sly, the experience couldn’t have been more bizarre. Between one normal minute and the next, a fantastic avalanche of radical, new ideas burst into my head with tremendous force, as if my skull were some sort of receiving station, turned up to unbearable volume. Not only ideas came through this channel, but sensations, intensified and pulsating. I was tuned in, turned on– whatever you want to call it– connected to some incredible source of energy. I didn’t even have time to call out to Rob.

It was as if the physical world were really tissue paper thin, hiding infinite dimensions of reality, and I was suddenly flung through the tissue paper with a huge ripping sound. My body sat at the table, my hands furiously, scribbling down the words and ideas that flashed through my head. Yet, I seemed to be somewhere else at the same time traveling through things. I went plummeting through a leaf to find a whole universe, open up, and then out again drawn into new perspectives.

I felt as if knowledge was being implanted in the very cells of my body so that I couldn’t forget it. I got knowing a biological spirituality. It was feeling and knowing, rather than intellectual knowledge. At the same time, I remembered having a dream the night before, which I had forgotten, in which this same sort of experience had occurred and I knew that the two were connected. When I came to, I found myself scrawling what was obviously meant as the title of that odd, batch of notes, The Physical Universe As Idea Construction.

Later, the Seth material would develop those ideas but I didn’t know that at the time, in one of the early sessions. Seth said that this had been his first attempt to contact me. I only know that if I begun speaking for Seth that night, I would have been terrified.

Here are a few excerpts from different books written from the mid 1960’s through to the mid 80’s.

Jane would go into trance and would dictate the books with few revisions. Robb would take dictation. Seth would cover topics that were wide ranging from the soul, the self, the psyche, the nature of reality, and topics (like probable realities) that were new at the time. Many ideas that you think of today were concepts that Seth put forward. Probable selves, timelines, and realities, were all presented first by Seth. Seth provided ways to explore the inner senses he often described, and he always accented the importance of the individual and how it must look for its own answers.

Now, decades later, I find that my experience is similar to the ones Jane has described. I found that her initial experience quoted by Jane earlier, is similar to how I experience extra sensory material: it isn’t rational or mental but is instead is felt at the atomic or cellular level. What others might feel, I can experience directly as if it was a reality to me, but often accompanied by bewilderment as to its source since the reaction lacks the cause that we are normally familiar with. Some of my experiences can be as vivid as a drug trip (I assume, never having taken LSD before). So much sounds so familiar both back then and now that it makes me certain that the material comes from a source that is more than an imaginal figment or other.

Seth is worth the purchase. The best first book is Seth Speaks. After that introduction, the rest of the material will make more sense. You can find the collection sold online.

I salute the light that is within you!

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An Expanding Awareness Of Time

Near Death Experiences, epiphanies, awakenings, precognitive dreams, and out of body experiences all contain similar phenomenon.  One key phenomenon is the perception of time.  In states of samadhi, monks describe an expanding present, of timelessness in much the same way that those who experience Near Death Experiences (NDE’s).  Similar perceptions or experiences are reported by those with out of  body states (OOBE’s).  Robert Monroe, the well-known author who wrote about his out of body experiences worked with the Psychology Department at the University of Virginia where it was discovered that while in his out of body state Monroe was able to see objects that were not physically present at the time of the experiments but were found to have been there in the past.

I grew up having clear precognitive dreams over many years.  I dreamed of births and deaths in my local community and as I got older, these dreams shifted to world events.  All of these dreams contained very specific details,  which when included or couched in the precognitive dream, took place later. I had dreams about an explosion at a nuclear facility in Russia where a plume of radiation was released into the atmosphere that moved to the West and came down as radioactive snow.  I saw how the people in the local area were being moved by rail cars as I watched a counter ticking off the number of people moved.  As the dream ended, the ticker was over 64,000 people and still running.  Three weeks later a roommate pointed to the television reminding me of the dream I had told him about before.  Events unfolded in the dream just as I had seen.  While the name of the location was not mentioned in the dream, the constellation of dream events fit the event that took place only later. In Cheynoby, three weeks later, there was an explosion at a power plant there.  People were moved away from the area on freight cars.  While the final number I saw was about 64,000 and counting, the total number moved was estimated at 100,000.  The explosion had sent radioactive plumes into the atmosphere and there was fallout some weeks later as snow in the West.  Radiation detectors were put up in Europe because of the disaster at Cherynobyl.

In similar fashion, I had a dream in the early 90’s of a massacre that took place in a compound of buildings at night.  After the shooting stopped, I walked through the compound and found a large building where many people lay dead.  About four weeks later, the siege of the Branch Davidian compound by the F.B.I.  resulted in mass death, with people being shot throughout the compound who appeared to be trying to escape.  At the time there was no indication that something like this would happen. No one would have guessed that such an event would happen. At the time of the dream I didn’t even think that this would turn out to be precognitive.  Who would have guessed?

I had dreams about who would become President of the United States well before the election starting with  Regan through to Bush Jr.  In some races, even in the last months of the campaigns, it was something that even the pundits had a hard time predicting.  The race with Clinton was not a clear-cut race, and as we know now with our election in the U.S., pundits predicted Hillary Clinton to win by a landslide.  Every dream of this type was always correct.  What is interesting is in the case of Bush and Gore, the dream showed that there was some question about voting results, what exactly, I didn’t know in the dream, only that just as Gore was about to become president, something was happening that would bring his and Bush’s people back to a given location over and over to attend to whatever this issue was.  So a number of weeks later I watched as the Gore and Bush campaigns returned to Florida to oversee the counting of voting cards which the Bush camp considered questionable, resulting in the Supreme Court deciding the election, I saw that this was a facet in my own dream, something that had not been present in any of my other “Presidential dreams.”  Later results showed that Gore had won the popular vote in the election, something that was being indicated in my dream.  Gore should have been President, at least if my dream was to be believed.  I was on my way to shake Gore’s hand, the sign in all of these dreams indicating to me who the winner of the contest would be. Instead, he turned away to go to a front desk in a hotel where he was given a note.  I never shook his hand….but I should have.  At the time of the dream I had no idea what this might mean exactly, but later the events lined up with the dream material.

What this has shown me is that the nature of time is not what we think it is. If time was simply linear, how was I able to see such a detailed outcome that came to pass?  Further, the one common element with all of the conditions for experiencing different aspects of time or being “outside” of time is one thing: an altered state (in my case in the dream state).  Materialistic science, though, throws its hands up when it comes to consciousness as a means of making observations about the nature of reality, let alone dealing with altered or alternate states of mind. Instead of consciousness considered as being independent of matter, science assumes consciousness is a product of nature, those random atoms careening through space.  If matter doesn’t reveal a transcendent nature, how then could consciousness ever do that?

There is an interesting thing that someone has had to say about time, and it comes from a unconventional source (sometimes you just have to step outside the box).  This comes from Jane Roberts, noted psychic medium for trance personality Seth. While Jane Roberts has since passed, she has left behind an impressive body of work.  During her life, Jane welcomed people from disciplines related to parapsychology, psychology and theoretical physics to sit in on sessions.  What I find so interesting is that the ideas that Seth was bringing up about alternate universes and probabilities are now a thing in the physics world.  No one seems to want to credit Jane, but her impact is nonetheless felt all around us.

Your idea of time and space are determined by your neurological structure.

The camouflage [Seth’s term for conditions that give rise to your perceiving only this reality as your main perceptual experience] is so craftily executed and created by the inner self that you must, of necessity, focus your attention in the physical reality which had been created.  The psychedelic drugs alter the neurological workings, and therefore can give some slight glimpses into other realities.

These realities exist, of course, whether or not you perceive them.  Actually ‘time’ exists as the pulses leap the nerve ends.  You must  then experience lapses, as this is not a simultaneous procedure.  Past, present and future appear highly convincing and logical when there must be a lapse between each perceived experience.

there is not such lapse in many other personality structures [not of our world].  Events are simultaneously perceived.  Reactions are also nearly instantaneous in your terms.  Growth and challenge are provided not in terms of achievement or development in time, but instead in terms of intensities. Such a personality is able not only to react to and appreciate Event A, say, in your present time, but to experience and understand Even A in all of its ramifications and probabilities….

Imagine past, present, and future then as a single-line delineation of experience in your terms; the line, however, continuing indefinitely.  Other personality structures from other dimensions could then, theoretically, observe it from an infinity of viewpoints.  However, there is much more to it than this.  The single [representing physical experience] is merely the surface thread along which you seem to travel.  It is all of the thread that you perceive, so when you envision other dimensions you are forced to think in terms of observers far above the thread, looking down upon it from any given viewpoint.

In actuality, following the image through, and strictly as an analogy, there would be an infinite number of threads both above and below your own, all part of one inconceivably miraculous webwork.  Yet, each thread would not  be one-dimensional but of many dimensions, and conceivably, if you knew how, there would be ways of leapfrogging from one thread to the other.”

(Jane Roberts, The Seth Material, Prentice Hall, ©1970, pp. 262-263)

I know that my own experiences with time as a quantity that sometimes appears to slow or to go away completely for a period of “time,” or as something that I have leap-frogged around in is not merely the linear phenomenon that it appears to be for most people. While our bodies are in the stream of time, our consciousness, that nonphysical part of us which has not mass, is not itself limited by what time appears to present itself as to us in our physical experience.  Experiments related to canceling gravity may in fact also have a time component since gravity and time are being discussed by physicists as part of what makes up the fabric of space-time.  In each case where someone experiences time differently, such as an NDE, OOBE, or in dreaming, they are perceiving through consciousness (we assume) and thus are not held to the flow of time as it happens on earth. Scientists thus presume that on planets with heavier gravity, time will move differently than here on earth.  This concept was explored in the movie Interstellar, resulting in the main character coming back to see his daughter who had aged into her 90’s while the father had not appeared to age at all.  All of this was due to having orbited or having been near the gravity of a black hole.

There is suddenly a growing awareness of people, myself included, about how what we do today is having an effect on the past as well as the future.  While we cannot impirically prove that a probable past was changed currently, we do have a growing body of observations by people just like yourself who have observed that this appears to  happen.  It’s worth considering and not tossing to the dust bin until we can in some way find proofs.  This is how we can keep our minds open on the cutting edge of discovery, and the community of people who are awakened certainly show every sign of doing this.

Now.  There is an aspect to time awareness that is nestled quite securely within teachings related to the topic of awakening, and many teachers have mentioned it.  In sum, it involves the saying which comes from Buddha and which has been popularized both by Ram Das and now more recently Ekhart Tolle, which is, “Be here now.”  By allowing yourself to shift focus from the part of your mind which is busy with paying attention to all of the details and sensory input in our day to day, to the part of you which is pure presence, what Zen Buddhists call Cosmic Mind, you can immediately enter into an awareness of how expansive time is and perhaps even experience the sense that often comes with this experience that time is not all that it appears to be.  Yes, certainly, we are in the flow of time, the aging of our bodies appear to show this, but in the stream of time are what I think are ranges where the mind can begin to feel into time, and in time there is an awareness of how this time flow is not all that there is merely as a surface appearance or effect.

When this happens, when you enter into this state of presence often mentioned by many teachers, you are, I observe, in another mode of consciousness or awareness.  When you do this, a greater and greater sense of peace and serenity often results.  It requires disciplining the mind in order to make it a regular experience, but it is well within the grasp of anyone. What happens when you move out of this flow that is in the present?  Very often, you can find yourself reflecting either in a forward of backward fashion on concerns about the past or the future.  Because you cannot seem to change the past and you think you have no control over the future, this can lead to anxiety, fear, or worry.  Now all of a sudden you are kicked out of the serene state of presence within the moment and you have just robbed yourself of a wonderful experience.  The trick in this is that we think that we cannot make amends for our past, or perhaps we have not made peace with something there.  As a result, this will lead you to recursively returning to this exact spot with the exact same feeling without anything having changed.  We can make change and find peace though by simply how we choose to think and feel about it.  We can forgive the past, we can forgive others and we can forgive ourselves.  For me, forgiveness has tended to come only after I have grown so weary of feeling bad about something or someone or some event as it happened in the past.

We do something similar with the future, though, which is we assume that our future will be just like our past and we project our thoughts out of the moment of the present into some vague but imagined future outcome that has everything to do with our prior experience instead of doing what is the most effective means for change.  What we can do is to imagine a completely different outcome.  The imagination is incredibly powerful when it is matched with feeling. No one ever changed their future without imagining and then truly wanting it with their whole being.  A famous self-help teacher once said, “If you can see it in your mind you can hold it in your hand.”  I would take this one step further and say yes, but you also need to feel it in your heart in order to have it in your life.

Until then, happy travels through time my friends!

What the Twin Forces Within Awakened Consciousness Has On Offer

This quote from Jane Roberts and her trance personality Seth describes precisely the two forces that were responsible not only for a new level of consciousness but for a new way of living. Within them is a new form of awareness if you are ready to embrace what this union represents.

Source: Seth International, Facebook