Mike's commentary · The Nature of the Psyche, 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

This chapter discusses the different frameworks of reference by which the psyche organizes experience. The psyche organizes experience according to emotional intensity and association rather than chronological order, and emotions can travel across time and space. The psyche is experienced through direct knowledge (instant understanding) and does not depend on words; but the three-dimensional world requires language as an intermediary. Using Jane's contact with Cezanne's worldview and other experiences as examples, Seth explains that unconventional knowledge can be obtained through desire, love, intent, and belief, and offers several exercises for readers to practice experiencing events outside of time and blending waking and dream states, in order to expand conscious perception.

Key Points of This Chapter

• The psyche organizes experience according to emotional intensity and association, not according to linear chronological order; emotions are not bound by time.
• Psychic knowledge is experienced as direct comprehension, without the need for verbal mediation, but the acquisition of knowledge in the three-dimensional world requires the aid of language and words.
• By providing suitable patterns through desire, love, intent, and belief, one can obtain information beyond ordinary knowledge; Jane's contact with Cezanne's worldview is an example.
• Human beings are innately endowed with tendencies toward language, learning, and exploration; at the psychic level there already exist templates of all kinds of knowledge, civilizations, and achievements, but they need desire and intent to activate them.
• Seth suggests several exercises for experiencing emotions and events outside chronological order, and for blending waking and dream states, thereby expanding conscious perception.

Main Text

Associativity: The Way the Psyche Organizes Experience

This chapter actually begins with a tail end from the previous session. Seth says the title of this chapter is association, emotion, and a different frame of reference.

The original word for "association" is association. Translating it as "association" is fine in psychology, but its original meaning is more about "associativity" or "connection" -- the word "association" itself carries too many meanings and can easily lead to ambiguity.

You Organize Experience by Emotional Intensity, Not by Time

Seth says that you usually organize your experience from the viewpoint of time, and this is quite normal -- we all organize the things we have experienced according to chronological order, according to a timeline.

However, your ordinary stream of consciousness is also highly associative. It is more a matter of associativity than of a timeline. For example, when you think about something right now, what made the deepest impression on you, what carried the strongest emotion or feeling, is what jumps out first, not what happened most recently. You remember something from several years ago very clearly, but if I ask you what you ate the day before yesterday, you may have long forgotten it and cannot recall it no matter how hard you try.

When people organize their own experience and what they have lived through, they do not do so by the concept of time, but by emotional intensity, or by a kind of associativity. When you encounter something wonderful, you naturally associate it with other wonderful things; when you are angry or encounter something unpleasant, you automatically associate it with things you dislike that are similar to this person or this event. You can even bring out the emotion you felt at the time of that event.

Certain present events will remind you of past events, and sometimes your memory of the past will color your present time. When some things you are experiencing right now may remind you of some things from before, and the emotions carried by those past memories may even color the current event you are encountering -- this is the mutual influence of past and present.

Whether or not you have this associativity, whether or not you associate with past events when dealing with current matters, it makes no difference whether you think of them or not. On our physical plane, we are in time, and we all remember things according to time. Our present moment cleanly follows the past moment -- one thing after another, this moment following that moment.

However, your psyche deals mostly with this associativity of yours, or with this process of association. On the level of your psyche, you do not remember according to chronological order, but according to the associativity between things -- things of the same kind, of the same nature, you associate them together, and by means of this association you organize the experience of events.

Something like time has no meaning within the framework of the psyche. You organize simply according to the degree of attention you give to an event, the intensity of the emotion, the depth of the memory -- not that the most recent event is remembered most clearly.

This association is connected together by emotional experience. Broadly speaking, emotion does not obey time -- emotion has nothing to do with time, and it can transcend time and space. That is to say, our psyche organizes your past events through emotion, rather than managing them like a rigid, emotionless timeline.

As everyone knows, this is the method we hypnotists use. A hypnotist uses the same emotion and feeling to bring you back to a certain time in the past. Here, emotion becomes a very crucial link.

Emotion itself traverses time and space. There is emotion in dreams, and there is emotion after you die. This emotion can cross between the physical world and the nonphysical world, across different dimensions -- what maintains the connection between different dimensions, what can cross them, is emotion.

Ruburt's Half-Knowing, Half-Sensing

He finished the theme of this chapter and then moved on to the next session. Session 762, Monday evening, December 15, 1975. Session 761 and this session were both devoted entirely to individual topics Seth developed outside the regular class material, rather than to the book itself.

Before the session, Jane herself said she felt half heavy and half light, with a strange sense of disturbance, or perhaps it would be better to call it impatience. She said that these spiritual things she half-knew and half-sensed had to be organized and expressed in our world -- for example, Seth, this book -- so that we could understand the whole thing.

The lightness came from the fact that she found that in real life she had been manifesting the existence of the spiritual world all along -- for example, the existence of Seth, the existence of this book. She had even recently made contact with this personality through Cezanne and transmitted the Cezanne material, looking at this worldview from the perspective of the French painter Cezanne.

The heaviness lay in the fact that this thing of hers was half-known and half-sensed. Seth had been transmitting material to her through telepathy, and she could understand it, but after she spoke it out -- or after Seth transmitted it -- she herself could not fully understand it either.

So what is the process by which Seth transmits through Jane? Is it what you think, that Seth uses Jane's mouth to speak his words? No. He directly pours a stream of consciousness, a concept, into Jane's mind. And after Jane receives such a concept and stream of consciousness, she must describe it in human language -- this is necessary.

Jane can never describe something she herself cannot understand. Just as you cannot describe something you have never seen and never known what it is. You say that's impossible? Then let me ask you to describe the principle of a time machine -- can you describe it? You cannot, because you simply do not understand it and have never seen it.

Jane is now in just such a situation. She keeps receiving material from Seth, but she herself is half-knowing and half-sensing, so she is half heavy and half light. The lightness is that fortunately there are the books, there are these things she transmits, there is Seth here; the heaviness is that this thing is unclear.

The reason she mentioned the French painter Paul Cezanne is that it involved an experience she had begun not long before. Since Seth himself discussed this point in this session, we need not go into it.

Direct Knowledge: Instant Understanding

Then Seth began dictating Chapter Three. He said:

When you are connected with your psyche, you experience direct knowledge, that is, understanding.

When we return to the level of the psyche, you arrive through direct knowledge - it is a feeling of "I get it." No need to say more, no need to explain; I understand, that is what it means. What is called direct knowledge is understanding.

When you are dreaming, you are experiencing a direct knowledge concerning your world. For example: when you dream, someone in front of you is telling you something. You may feel this person is very familiar, maybe a cousin or a distant relative, but this person may not even appear, may not have a concrete appearance - you just know it is your cousin telling you something. All communication in dreams happens through telepathy.

In dreams, you use a different way to understand your own existence, different from your usual understanding. You are basically in a state of "getting it instantly." If you carefully recall your dreams, you will find that this is how it is: someone says something to you, and you immediately know what he means - maybe you do not even hear the sound of his voice.

But in the three-dimensional world it is different. When you are reading a book, you are experiencing indirect knowledge. For example, when you read the Seth books now, you cannot possibly get it instantly - if you could, then it would not require me to spend this time and energy explaining it to you all.

Through reading you may arrive at understanding, or you may not. You say, I can understand any book? How is that possible? Just because you can read the words, can you understand it? Not necessarily. If you do not believe it, go look at books on biology, polymers, computer science, even quantum mechanics. You understand every word, but can you understand what it is saying? That is not necessarily so.

But -

Session 762

Understanding itself exists, whether or not you have words or even thoughts to express it.

Understanding itself exists; it does not necessarily need words, books, or some kind of thought to be expressed. Of course, in the three-dimensional world we do need these things, but on a higher level, even in dreams, you do not need words or even the existence of thought—you just instantly understand. Do not misunderstand this; in the three-dimensional world they are still needed. It is like when someone says that a boy from Sirius, with one listen of his ear, can instantly acquire the knowledge of a book thousands of pages long—well, if you do not have that ability, you still have to read page by page.

You may understand the meaning of a dream and immediately grasp what it means, with no linguistic form of understanding at all—it is not that someone uses a dream dictionary to explain it to you; in the dream you instantly understand what this matter means to you.

Your ordinary thoughts may waver, or slide around your inner understanding, without ever really expressing it.

Your ordinary conscious thoughts may not be so firm; they slide around and keep changing, because they are changing along with your inner understanding. If you truly understand it, then it does not need to keep changing like this; it is direct understanding. If it must be contacted through words as this kind of three-dimensional understanding, then it is constantly changing—the same passage of text, seen by different people, is understood differently.

Another Frame of Reference

In dreams you are dealing with the reality of associations and emotions. Reality — that is, skipping the intermediary of language and words. Because these are skipped, the plot in a dream appears incomprehensible and completely without logic in ordinary life.

He said:

I have said before, no one can define your psyche. It can only be experienced.

It can be experienced, but it cannot be defined. Since its activities, wisdom, and perceptive abilities mostly arise from another kind of reference frame — your psyche comes from another reference frame, not from our three-dimensional world — you must learn, in this encounter where you ordinarily interpret your own psyche, learn what? Learn to know that its reference system is different from yours. You cannot use your traditional three-dimensional world frame of reference to understand it; you must learn to look at things from its point of view.

The greatest difficulty here is what? It is a matter of organization. The psyche world organizes experience through emotion, while our three-dimensional world organizes experience through linear time and space.

In your ordinary life, you very "neatly" organize your experience — this "neatly" here is not a term of praise but a term of criticism; it just means seeking what is convenient. You quickly categorize the things you experience, push them into accepted patterns or channels, push them into preconceived concepts or beliefs, then you trim them so that they fit a temporal sequence, arranging them into the big temporal order. For the ways you cannot understand, you also do not carefully distinguish; you directly and quickly categorize them and arrive at muddled conclusions.

For the things you have encountered, whether or not they completely match, you automatically assign them to a similar or approximate category. Then through time, you arrange them in a certain chronological order: this happened first, that happened later, this happened because that happened — and here causality comes in.

But the psyche's organization does not follow this temperament. The psyche world does not need this way.

Its products often seem chaotic only because they overstep your accepted concepts about what experience is.

The actual products and results of the psyche, only because they surpass our accepted understanding of what experience itself is, are why the psyche's feeling seems chaotic to you.

How Seth Himself Summarizes These Books

The entire Seth material is about spirituality. Although this book is singled out and called The Nature of the Psyche, he actually talks about spiritual matters in all of his books.

For example, in Seth Speaks, Seth himself says:

In Seth Speaks, I tried to describe certain extensions of your own reality, using terms my readers could understand, in a way they could accept.

What is Seth Speaks? It is a description of our world, with some extensions made on the basis of our cognition -- certain extensions. Keep this in mind, this is the main point of Seth Speaks.

But is it the true appearance of this world? No. It is only one step closer on the foundation of what you can understand. You will find it so miraculous; many people say that after listening to Seth Speaks, decades of confusion were resolved. But you need to understand, this is only a further extension into a certain domain of your present reality; in some domains he has not yet extended.

Then he goes on to talk about The Nature of Personal Reality -- the book we discussed earlier. He says:

I tried to expand the boundaries of the ordinarily experienced substance of personal existence.

I broadened the restrictive boundaries concerning you as a person, and removed the restrictive beliefs as well. He puts it more specifically:

I tried to give the reader some hints that could increase the practical, spiritual, and physical enjoyment and achievement in our daily lives.

He lets you open up the restrictions in body, mind, and spirit, and gain pleasure and achievement in all three.

Then he talks about the form of these books:

These books were all dictated by me, in a somewhat linear narrative manner.

A somewhat linear narrative manner -- that is, starting from Chapter 1, with a sequence of chapters, appearing to be narrative, but it does not have to be understood that way. So many people ask, do I have to start from the beginning of a certain chapter and read through? Reading it that way is fine, no problem; you can also start from any piece, any session, and that is fine too.

Then he mentions The "Unknown" Reality -- a book I have not yet covered. He says:

I showed further how psychic experience could emerge outward into the light of day.

The spiritual worlds are all within our inner hearts. He says that through The "Unknown" Reality, he placed it under the sunlight -- making your exploration of the unknown domains of the psyche as clear and simple as looking at things in our three-dimensional world under the sun. He gave us a display of the other worlds within the spiritual world. At the same time, he hoped that in that book, through my dictation and the personal experiences of Ruburt and Joseph, readers could understand the greater resources that touch everyday life -- allowing readers to come into contact with a broader dimensional space and a broader world that is also closely related to our daily lives.

You might ask, what does understanding that world have to do with this lifetime of mine? Of course it has something to do with it -- worlds are all interconnected, they are not separated from one another; every world has connections with every other world.

The act of writing the notes itself demonstrates that the psyche is not limited by time

That book required Joseph to do a great deal of work, namely writing many notes. Those added notes are themselves a demonstration—a demonstration that psychic events are very difficult to pin down within time.

When Rob added the notes, he often cited things said in earlier books, earlier material, and he would bring in related material connected to that concept and that book into the notes. So what Seth means is that the very process of Rob adding the notes, this act itself, already demonstrates that the psychic world does not depend on time for its existence.

He says:

His activities seem to go in all directions. For example, it would be easy to say: this event came after that one, this event began at that time, and later ended at that time. Yet when Joseph does his notes, it is obvious that these events can hardly be pointed out with such precision, and indeed they seem to have no beginning and no end.

The psychic world is interconnected and open; it points in all directions. In everyday life we often say this thing began at such-and-such a time and ended at such-and-such a time, but in fact you will find that you cannot point it out precisely—the beginning and end of an event cannot be determined; it is without beginning and without end.

The reason you think it has a beginning and an end is that your understanding has simplified it and confined it within a certain scope. For example, if you go out to pour yourself a glass of water, you think this event has a beginning and an end because you have confined it within a certain scope. Where did the thought of drinking water come from? Where did the water come from? Where did the water go after you drank it? If you pursue it, isn't it endless?

Where does the water come from, and where does it go? How do you know that the drop of water you drank is not the very same drop that existed when the earth first formed? That it is not a water molecule produced by a comet striking the earth from the cosmos? Suppose it is—then hasn't this drop of water already traversed a history of over ten billion years? After you drink it, it may disperse into the air through your sweat, saliva, tears, or breath, or be broken down by your kidneys and excreted into nature through urine—then where did those water molecules go?

From the perspective of the psyche, these things have no beginning or end. I just raised this example offhand; it may not be entirely apt, but it is just to help you understand.

He says:

You do not have to pay this particular tax on time, because you connect your experience so directly with time.

Except in dreams, you are not connected with time. In dreams there is no concept of time; you cannot remember in which year, month, or day a dream took place. But there is the concept of events—you dreamed of such-and-such, you returned to that event, and that is possible, but you cannot remember the specific time, because it has nothing to do with time in itself.

He says:

You seldom allow yourself any experience that seems to contradict it.

Contradict what? Contradict time. In your life, you seldom allow yourself to detach an event from time—you cannot do it. You will inevitably think: this event happened in which year, which month, which day, and at which period of time. Therefore you limit your experience of the psyche, because you always bring the concept of time with you when you look at the psychic world.

Ruburt's Tolerance and Limitations

On the subject of limitations:

Ruburt is far more tolerant than most of our readers.

Ruburt was not that rigid. His spirituality was actually quite high, so his conceptual limitations regarding time were not that rigid. Ruburt often had out-of-body and extrasensory experiences -- didn't he also run an extrasensory perception class? He could very intuitively sense the existence of this spiritual world, not to mention his contact with Seth and his transmission of the Seth books.

However:

Ruburt still often expected his rather unorthodox experiences to appear in the orderly clothing that all of you are familiar with.

What does that mean? It means in a proper and serious manner, or within so-called science and rationality, within so-called mainstream thought. Although Ruburt could experience the magic of the psyche, he always wanted to fit it into a rational framework -- this was one of Jane's issues.

Seth continued: In the last book session, he gave the title for this chapter. The previous session spoke of emotions and associations or connections, and the fact that the psyche must be directly experienced -- the psyche must be experienced; this is a fact. It cannot be defined, only experienced.

Before that evening, Seth had not continued writing the book, because in the previous two sessions he had discussed other matters. Meanwhile, Ruburt experienced dimensions of the psyche that were new to him. In the middle of this, Jane's cat woke up -- because they were holding a session, the cat had been shut in another room.

Seth said:

Ruburt did not think that his experiences had any connection with this book, or consider what inner order he was following in such spontaneous action. He wanted the book to proceed neatly, one page after another.

He also used the word "neatly." He wanted this book to proceed one page after another, one day after another. But:

Each of his experiences demonstrated that the direct experience of the psyche defies your bland concepts of the reality of time and of orderly events.

The actual experiences Ruburt went through -- in an instant he made contact with the values of Paul Cezanne, the French painter, and through Cezanne's perspective discussed some issues of art and worldviews from an artist's point of view. He even wrote it into a book.

He said that in this matter, Ruburt truly defied our concepts of time and of the real world as orderly and seemingly bland -- the seemingly normal, reasonable, and unremarkable concepts were all shattered by him.

This also served to point out the difference between knowledge and understanding -- the process itself pointed out the difference between knowledge and understanding. Through direct contact with Cezanne's worldview, rather than contact with Cezanne's soul itself, Ruburt connected with the worldview Cezanne left behind. He was then able to view art and the entire world entirely from the perspective of a famous painter like Cezanne, and he understood it instantly.

Cezanne's understanding of the world instantly became Jane's understanding of the world. It was as if Jane instantly acquired Cezanne's complete worldview and values -- knowledge was not acquired through the learning you imagine, but was understood in an instant.

In our group, whether on WeChat or QQ, Yuting has been translating this book. She has already finished the translation and has been looking for a publisher; she may still be proofreading. If you are interested, you may be able to see this book before too long.

Knowledge Has to Pass Through a Filter

Seth's own experience is somewhat separated from the readers, because he is not in our physical reality space. The information he transmits to Ruburt must pass through Ruburt as a filter. This is necessary, because there is no way to skip Ruburt and transmit directly. Without Ruburt's presence, the Seth material could not be transmitted.

In other words, however much Ruburt can understand of Seth, that is how much he can transmit; the things he cannot understand, he cannot transmit clearly either. Let me put it more bluntly: the things he cannot understand, he can only imitate without real comprehension, forcing himself to speak about them—but because he himself does not understand, he can only explain them in a very strained way.

So sometimes when you look at certain parts of the Seth material, where some concepts are spoken of vaguely and unclearly, those are the parts that Jane did not fully understand. She herself did not deny this. In the officially published books, Seth lowered the difficulty; but in the early sessions, Jane would often mention, "Seth transmitted some material to me, but I cannot describe him." She often said that Seth gave her a picture, a dynamic picture, a three-dimensional or hyper-dimensional picture in her mind, but she could not depict it. Jane said that language is truly powerless and pale, and I really cannot depict the things in my mind.

This is something that cannot be helped. So he says:

Ruburt's recent experience is particularly important in that its implications are opposite to many of the core beliefs generally held as acceptable.

The fact that Jane was able to write such a book by connecting to Paul Cezanne's worldview—this event in itself already overturns the core beliefs and core perceptions of ordinary people. He says:

We will use these recent episodes as an opportunity to discuss the existence of such seemingly extraordinary knowledge, which can be accessed.

On the Acquisition of Knowledge

Seth says that Ruburt's recent experience is particularly important. The significance of this experience is that it is opposite to many of the core beliefs generally held by people. The fact that Jane was able to connect to Paul Cezanne's worldview through writing a book—this event in itself already overturns the core values, core perceptions, and core beliefs of ordinary people. Seth says that they can use this recent episode as an opportunity, as a case study, to discuss how such seemingly extraordinary, non-normal knowledge exists and can be accessed—and is usually not touched upon. Jane is a typical case of this.

Later Jane also wrote a book about a philosopher—an American psychologist and philosopher, James¹—and through some means she also made contact with James. Seth says that he will further describe the trigger, the triggering mechanism, that can make this information practical—or bring it into the practical range. This information is just sitting there, but for most people—indeed for the vast majority of people—it is inaccessible. So how did it become accessible to Jane? Seth says, let us discuss the reason Jane obtained this material—what the triggering mechanism was. And when we study this triggering mechanism, can we also apply the same method in our own daily lives to obtain the information and material we want? Of course, this is the purpose of Seth writing this session.

Innate Patterns

First, Seth has a few points to explain.

You are naturally endowed with the propensity for language.

In other words, the reason we humans have language is that language itself is already embedded in our physical structure. Language seems to be a result of biological evolution—biologists and scientists give you many explanations—but Seth says no, your physical structure carries the pattern that enables language to form. For example, you cannot make a snake speak, because its physical structure simply does not allow it, and it cannot develop language.

Seth also says:

You are naturally endowed with the propensity to learn and explore.

We are born with this ability; our curiosity and our love of learning do not need to be stimulated by others. We are naturally curious babies, and we love to explore the unknown. That is why those of you listening have followed the Seth material all the way to this point—this is all unknown territory. This is innate. Remember this firmly: it is not that some people have it and some do not; everyone has it, but some people have restricted themselves to death.

When you were being conceived, when you were an embryo, when you were inside your mother's womb, there was already a mold corresponding exactly to the adult body you would grow into. This "pattern" can be translated as "mode," but I think "mold" is better here—somewhat like the molds we use to make mooncakes or cakes: you put the material in, press it once, and out comes a mooncake. His meaning is that when you were in your mother's womb, what you would grow up to look like, how tall you would be, what your features would be, whether your skin would be fair or dark—all of this was already defined, and this mold already existed. That is, your adult appearance was already determined when you were an embryo.

This mold is definite enough to give you a recognizable adult form.

It is clear to the point that what you would look like when you grew up was already decided long ago—clear enough to be recognized. It is not a vague genetic-level thing, like your eyes are black or your hair is black, but very specific—specific to the point that your appearance can be identified. From your contours and features, people can tell that this is you and no one else.

Then you might say, does that mean I have no room for development? No. He says:

At the same time it is flexible enough to allow for infinite variations.

Here you must remember that Seth's statements—including many actual spiritual statements—are always a paradox. Within seemingly opposite or self-contradictory words lies the truth of the matter. Truth is born within this paradox. You must get used to this, and you must abandon our three-dimensional world concepts—black or white, right or wrong, that if something is expressed one way it cannot be expressed another way. Seth deliberately expresses things to you in two ways, and both ways are correct.

In this small example: when you were an embryo, what you would look like was already decided, but he also tells you that you have abundant variation and infinite possibility—the mold of your appearance is already set, but as you grow up, as your beliefs change and you are reborn anew, your appearance will also change. Whether you want to become better-looking or uglier is entirely determined by your inner self. Are these two statements contradictory? They are not contradictory. If you think they are contradictory, they actually are not: a mold has already been set for you, but you can freely develop and freely change on the basis of this mold. But no matter how you change, your mother will still recognize you. You cannot joke that you got plastic surgery to the point that your own mother cannot recognize you. When you are finally reborn anew, after the rebirth, others will still recognize you at a glance—this is you. In this way the two concepts are unified—others can recognize you at a glance, yet the specific details of your appearance have infinite variations that you yourself can decide.

But there is a question here: if you say you are forced to become a person, that you will grow up to be whatever you grow up to be, then why are there people who die in their teens, people who die at a few years old, or even miscarriages? Is this not a contradiction? His meaning is: there is no compulsion; no one says you are forced to grow into an adult. At any given time, you can end this process—you can commit suicide at any time; if you no longer want to experience it, you can leave at any time. Many people die young, or even die as embryos—this is very normal. It is not that if there is a mooncake mold, a mooncake must be produced. The mooncake mold only proves that there is this possibility, that a mooncake may be produced, but it does not necessarily mean that this mooncake will definitely exist.

From another angle, because in your terms, this developmental mold exists—from our human perspective, there is still a developmental pattern that exists, and it is not fixed and unchanging; your appearance is also changing. But this does not mean that each such development is not unique—in other words, you are the only one, and your appearance is also one of a kind. Although you have infinite possible developments, your mother will still recognize you when she sees you.

In your terms—still using our human terms—at any given Earth time, there are many such molds in existence. There are many probable selves; every probable self, every simultaneous time, has a probable you—those are all your molds. So from the broad perspective of education, all time is simultaneous—time is simultaneous. Therefore all these physical molds exist simultaneously, and all these probable yous exist simultaneously, on different space-time levels. Then you might ask, do they look the same? Of course not. But when you see one of them, you can recognize him at a glance—he is you, another probable you. But will he look exactly like you, like twins? Of course not; absolutely not. So is this contradictory? It is not contradictory; it is perfectly normal.

In other words, decades have passed since you graduated from school, yet your elementary school classmates, when they see you, can in some cases recognize you. Although you look completely different from when you were a child—if you look carefully at childhood photos, there is a great change—that spirit, that essence, is still there, and that essence is very difficult to describe in words.

All Molds on the Spiritual Level

In the middle, Seth took a break. He said that in the spiritual realm—you should remember the premise, it is in the spiritual realm—he says:

Our knowledge, cultures, civilizations, individual and mass achievements, sciences, religions, arts, and technologies, and all the patterns of the arts, exist in the same fashion.

What does this passage mean? Just as every embryo, before it grows into an adult, already has its adult form determined—he says that on the spiritual level, all your knowledge, cultures, civilizations, individual and group achievements, sciences, religions, technologies, and all the molds of the arts, were already determined long ago, already exist. This is laying the groundwork for us first: you think your knowledge is learned bit by bit, but he is actually telling you—you have a mold of knowledge here, and you are merely learning within the framework of this knowledge mold. The same goes for individual achievements, collective achievements, group achievements, and our level of technology.

For example, the iPhone, in the eyes of the world, was developed step by step, but actually, before it existed, this mold was already there. But remember, this is definitely on the spiritual level; do not get confused, and do not think in the physical material world that "this technology has long since been developed." He has a premise here; you cannot misuse it. This is from the spiritual perspective—all of this already exists.

Each person's psyche—the part of you that you do not recognize—is aware of these patterns, or patterns such as these.

The so-called psyche is the part of yourself that you have not recognized, have not perceived. Your psyche is able to perceive these forms of knowledge, religion, and so on—all the things he listed above—the form in which they exist. Just as the psyche is aware of your physical appearance, your physical mold, your biological mold—that is, your appearance—and through the psyche, your image is formed with this as the core.

Seth has said before that what you look like is entirely determined by your inner self—by your inner world, your inner self. But what does your inner self base its decisions on? It is based on a mold, and your psyche knows this mold. In plain human terms, your soul knows what you look like—knows what you looked like at age one, age two, in elementary school, in high school, in college, before marriage, after marriage. To put it even more bluntly, it knows what you look like every day, every minute, every second. That is why it can mobilize and direct the cells, tissues, bones, and muscles of your physical body to grow in that direction, to grow into the appearance you want.

Your psyche knows that this mold exists, and knows what this mold looks like; it develops according to this mold. But in this process, you have great autonomy; you can change it—you can adjust your beliefs through your own inner self, your inner heart, your inner self, to change it. But this change must be made on the basis of this mold, so in the end others can still recognize you; no one will look at you and call you Fan Bingbing, because you are you.

Propensities, Possibilities, and Activation

Certain propensities and possibilities are built into your biological structure.

Certain propensities of yours—what you might grow up to look like—are determined within your biological structure. You can also call this genes; it does not matter what you call it. This is already determined within the biological structure. We often joke, "I want to find a good-looking partner, because then our children will be better-looking"—the meaning is similar.

Then, according to your purposes and intents, they may or may not be activated. The possibilities of what you might grow up to look like all exist, but what you specifically grow up to look like—he says here—depends on your own purposes and intents; they may be activated, or they may not be. The example he gives below will make it clear.

You personally may have the ability to become an excellent athlete, but your propensities and intents may lead you in a different direction; you may want to become a painter. Therefore the necessary trigger was not pulled.

What necessary trigger? The trigger for becoming an excellent athlete was not pulled, so you did not become an excellent athlete, but you have the potential to become an excellent athlete—the mold of an excellent athlete is already there.

Each individual is gifted in different directions; you have your own strengths and your own specialties. Your own desires and beliefs activate certain abilities and neglect others. It is not that those abilities do not exist; it is that you have not mobilized them, have not activated them; the trigger was not pulled.

Mankind possesses within its endowments all the knowledge, information, and data that might be necessary under all conditions.

Human beings have this ability; within their endowments they have all possible knowledge. For example, suppose a person could develop into a painter, an athlete, a musician—assuming these three are his three endowed attributes—then he could develop in all three directions, and all the knowledge, intelligence, information, and data needed for these three developments are all within him. But which one you activate depends on what you yourself like.

However, these endowments must be activated on the spiritual level. This is a key sentence that you must remember and underline: your potential exists, but it must be activated on the spiritual level. If it is not activated, it will not manifest. It is the same as the physical mechanism—for example, a muscle is activated by desire and intent; it is the same principle.

Seth says that this does not mean that, in a broad sense, you already know the things you learn. The way he says this might make you feel that everything has already been predetermined, including what you look like—then why should I still study? Then I am born knowing how to play the piano, so why study at all? None of this is the case; you must remember this.

For example, if you learn a skill, without the desire to activate it, that skill will not be developed—first there must be the desire to activate it. But even when you do learn such a skill, you use it in your own unique way. You first need the desire to learn this skill, to learn a certain ability, but it does not mean that if you are endowed with such a skill, you do not need to learn. You still need to learn; it is just that in the learning process, you may learn faster than others, pick it up more easily, and perhaps reach a height that others cannot attain. But it does not mean you do not need to learn; you will use this skill in your own unique way, and this varies from person to person.

The same knowledge of mathematics and art is within you, as your genetic inheritance is.

Here he mentions mathematics. Many mathematicians, many artists—whether you can become an artist, whether you have what it takes to become a mathematician—such knowledge itself is within your body, just like your genetic inheritance is within your body. It is only a matter of whether you activate it, whether you start it up.

But what do we humans usually do? We usually believe that all this external data, this information, this knowledge, must come from outside—we believe these things are learned from outside. We are born as a blank sheet of paper; our brains are a blank slate; from a little baby we gradually learn about this external world; we learned it, rather than being born with it.

Seth continues:

The mathematical formula is certainly not imprinted on your brain.

The mathematical formula is certainly not printed on your brain; it is not pre-installed in your brain at birth. But mathematics itself is an innate capability of the structure of the human brain. In other words, your brain, in terms of its biological structure, is already designed to allow you to do mathematical reasoning and analysis, and to engage in abstract learning. This also explains why animals cannot do it—why can animals not learn mathematics? Because their brains do not have this function; biologically, they simply cannot.

Earlier he said that the knowledge of mathematics and art is carried innately, present from the womb. Then if it is something carried from the womb, we do not need to learn—the formulas are all there, and we do not even need to take exams. He says no, you still have to learn. Is this not another contradiction? It is exactly that contradictory. Whenever it involves spiritual matters, it is always contradictory. So why is science incompatible with spirituality? Because science always wants to find a non-contradictory way to explain this world, but when it touches the spiritual world, it is contradictory everywhere—there is not a single place that is not contradictory. So science looks down on these spiritual things, thinking that you are completely contradicting yourself; I do not even need to point it out—you cannot even make your own story consistent.

Mathematics and art themselves are within every person, but it does not mean that the mathematical formulas are printed on your brain. His meaning is that the biological structure of your brain itself has the ability to process mathematical problems, to do reasoning and abstract analysis, while other brains do not. It implies that mathematical formulas and mathematical principles are within your brain—implied, remember, this is implied. I will not tell the amazing stories about mathematicians; if you look into it, there is a famous mathematical genius in India²—how that developed—including many amazing mathematicians; when you read their autobiographies, it is very magical, as if those formulas and those things suddenly appeared in their minds like a flash of inspiration.

A Practical Example

Seth says:

Your own focus determines which information is available to you.

Your own focus of attention determines what you get. He says, let me give you an example here.

Ruburt paints as a hobby.

Jane likes to paint; Rob encouraged her, and Seth also encouraged her, saying she could paint in her spare time. Sometimes she paints for quite a long time—for a period she paints for a long time—and then she forgets about it. And Joseph is a painter—Rob himself is a professional painter. Ruburt has always wondered what the inner content of the mind is; she is very curious about how the human brain obtains information.

Christmas was approaching, and Jane asked Joseph what kind of gift he wanted. Rob generally answered like this:

I would like a book on Cezanne as a Christmas gift.

They are describing this process between them. Ruburt's love for Joseph, plus her own purpose—she wanted to learn to paint, and she also loved painting, and she had more and more questions about painting—because she was a beginner at painting, along with her interest in painting—all of this activated the kind of stimulus sufficient to break through the usual beliefs about time and knowledge. The combination of all this, plus Jane's own psychic ability, activated such a stimulus that transcended time and space.

Ruburt tuned her frequency to Cezanne's worldview. Because she herself liked painting, because she wanted to give her husband a book about Cezanne, she adjusted this frequency. She did not contact Cezanne himself, but rather contacted Cezanne's understanding of painting as an art—Cezanne's own understanding. In terms of technique, Ruburt was not even dexterous enough to follow Cezanne's instructions. Painting requires years of foundational training from childhood; her foundation was insufficient, so even if Cezanne gave her instructions, she could not fully follow Cezanne's instructions to paint what he wanted. But Rob is dexterous; Rob is a professional painter, but he cannot follow another person's insight—Rob did not make contact with Cezanne. So Cezanne could not speak directly to Rob; he could speak directly to Jane, but Jane herself did not have the painting foundation.

Even so, the information that Jane transmitted was still extremely valuable. And knowledge on any subject can be obtained in this way—knowledge on any subject in your daily life can be obtained through a method like Jane's. But it is obtained through desire and intent; the premise is that it can only be obtained through desire and intent. This is the key—this is the trigger that activates it; this is the activation mechanism.

Seth is not saying that spontaneously, without guidance, any person suddenly becomes a great painter or writer or scientist; it is not like that; it is not like what you imagine, where a person is suddenly struck by lightning and becomes a scientist. However, it does mean that our human race—the human species—possesses within itself those propensities that can blossom. That is, the mold is still there; you possess this knowledge potential, with the propensity to blossom; as long as the conditions are ripe, with some fertilizer and watering, it can bloom.

This also points out that because this method is not utilized—we ordinarily do not utilize this method—your limitations, you are limiting the scope of your knowledge. We ordinarily do not use this method to learn; very few people use this method to learn. But he does not mean that in your terms all knowledge already exists—from another angle, he again emphasizes the opposite side: it is not as you think, that if this is the case, then all the knowledge in the human world already exists, and we can just go and fetch it. We do not need to go to school; we can just sit here every day; if we want to learn science, we connect with Einstein; if we want to learn art, we connect with the great artists; if we want to learn business, we connect with the great entrepreneurs—no, it is not that all this knowledge is already sitting there.

Because when you receive knowledge, it automatically becomes completely personalized to you, and therefore new.

He again elaborates on this issue from another angle: the knowledge is there, but it must pass through the process of your receiving it; only in this process does it become personalized, does it become your knowledge through your personal understanding. Therefore this knowledge, after being processed by you, becomes new knowledge, becomes your knowledge. So you are actually expanding and adding to this knowledge itself, rather than being passive, like a force-fed duck being stuffed with a pile of knowledge.

The Process of Jane Receiving the Cezanne Material

Seth gives an excellent description of the circumstances that formed Jane's experience with the Cezanne painting. He says, here is what happened:

On December 1st, before dawn, Jane quite suddenly began writing an automatic manuscript.

That is, automatic writing; she did not know where it came from; she suspected it was from the painter Paul Cezanne. Cezanne lived from 1839 to 1906; he is already deceased. She had no idea whether this manuscript would continue to come—Jane did not know whether this manuscript was continuous, or just an inspiration on a particular day. However, the insight into art and life that it displayed already astonished me—this passage was written by Rob. Rob is describing how Jane wrote this book about Cezanne. Before dawn, Jane suddenly got up and began automatic writing, writing on paper with a pen. The insight into art and life that she wrote out already astonished a professional painter—because Rob is a professional painter—because that level is not something an ordinary person can reach. And Jane clearly could not reach this level, because she was still a primary school student in painting.

Below is what Seth said to Jane:

Your desire automatically attracts the kind of information you need, though you may or may not be aware of it.

What is the core here? Your desire—how much you want to learn, how much you want to obtain this knowledge, the intensity of this desire—automatically attracts the information you need. The information comes automatically, no matter in what way. Here you must not be rigid about it. Many people are rigid and say, then I must receive it through a meditation, an inspiration, or a block of knowledge that suddenly pops into my brain. No. The ways it comes are endlessly varied, not fixed. Maybe you want to learn something, and suddenly you open a video, and suddenly someone is talking about that very thing, and as soon as you hear it you understand it. That is also a way. Maybe just when you want to learn something, a study class or a training course suddenly appears in your life, and then you go and learn it, and instantly you understand it. In other words, the fact that you are studying this Seth material today—was it not also drawn by your desire that you found the Seth material? It is the same.

What is the core here? Your desire, how much you want to know this, how much you want to learn it.

He gives an example:

If you have a gift, or if you want to be a musician, then you may actually learn in sleep.

But it is also possible that you meet a good teacher in reality; all of these are possible. As for other musicians who are still alive, or who have already died, or their worldviews, adjust your frequency. When you wake up, you will receive inner hints, clarity, or inspiration. What he means is that you will be given a great deal of inspiration, clarity, and hints. In your study of music, you will be given these things, and in this way they will be of great help to your musical learning.

But you may still need to practice; you must practice. You cannot say, I will not study anymore, I will not practice anymore, I am born able to play the piano beautifully—no. But your practice will mostly be joyful—at this time your learning of the piano is joyful, not painful. And you will not spend as much time as others do; you learn it as soon as you try, you grasp it at a touch, and as soon as the teacher explains it you understand. This is what it means to have a gift in this area. We often call this kind of thing a gift. You have received this kind of information—what information? That is, those hints, clarity, or inspiration. You have obtained such information, which is very beneficial to your technique, to your playing technique, to your musical skill. And this information that you have obtained basically operates outside of time—it does not happen within our time; it is inner information, so it is outside of time.

Therefore Ruburt's material on Cezanne came very quickly; it was obtained in less than a day. Yet its quality was so high that even professional art critics could learn from it—that is, Cezanne's way of seeing the world from an artistic perspective had already surpassed professional art critics, and art critics had to learn from this kind of thing. And at this time Jane was still a complete beginner in painting, and she obtained it in less than a day. Although some of their works might require much more time—these art critics or master artists, their own works might require a great deal of time to create. They have learned through very broad conscious knowledge; an art critic must have very broad knowledge of art, otherwise you cannot casually criticize others—and those are things Ruburt almost completely lacked. Ruburt could not possibly have such a deep understanding of art.

Therefore this psychic product—that is, this book, Cezanne's worldview—by its very nature shatters many cherished beliefs. This psychic work, its very appearance has already overturned the belief systems that we ordinarily regard as real, or as the most central, and thus overturned our worldview. We come to recognize the importance and the wondrousness of psychic knowledge.

The Purpose of Education

You have to assume that this kind of knowledge can be obtained, and it may seem like a kind of superstition. If someone says we want to—this kind of knowledge is everywhere, let us obtain knowledge in this way—it seems like a kind of superstition, because then what use would education be? The mainstream traditional view does not accept this method. If it did accept it, then people would say, then let us not go to school anymore; what use would education still have?

Seth says, yet what should education be?

It should be to introduce a student to as many fields of endeavor as possible, so that he can recognize the field that can be used as a natural trigger, in order to open skill or further development.

The function of education should be to bring the student this kind of trigger, this triggering mechanism.

This is also how American education is today. We will talk about the difference between American education and Chinese education. Many of our parents think that American basic education is not good, that maybe its high technology is okay, and its university education is okay, but its basic education is not good—this is understanding it through Chinese educational concepts. In fact, Chinese educational concepts, I can say with full responsibility, are far behind; they are not on the same level or in the same dimension.

Then let me briefly expand on this. For example, American primary and secondary education emphasizes the breadth of students' knowledge, and this coincides exactly with Seth's theory. So there is a slogan in American education, which says that the breadth of knowledge should be a mile wide—a mile is 1.6 kilometers; for a primary or secondary school student, knowledge should be broad. As for depth, it only needs to be an inch deep. American primary and secondary schools—I mean below high school—emphasize only three things: cultivating your interests and hobbies, cultivating your imagination, and cultivating your confidence to challenge authority. These are the three core things in its primary and secondary education. Among them, the most crucial is cultivating interests and hobbies. It holds that if any person achieves anything, it must be driven by his interests and hobbies behind it. If a person cannot find his interests and hobbies, then it lets you try, lets you come into contact with all kinds of subjects, all kinds of knowledge, all kinds of possibilities, and then lets the student find what interests him through this broad contact—that is, as Seth says, discover that natural trigger, and then discover his own gifted ability. This is the core of its teaching.

So today I am not talking about education, but from this level you can understand at what level the gap between Chinese education and American education lies.

Knowledge Can Come from the Future

Then the student will make a choice; he will make a choice according to his own interests and hobbies.

Cezanne's material came from the past, and he says that future knowledge can also be obtained, and is also very accessible. For example, we have mentioned many times the scientist Tesla³; many of his inventions and creations came from the future. Future knowledge can also be obtained. Your standpoint in the past, and the probable future—your knowledge may come from the past, like that of Cezanne, a person of the last century; or it may come from the future, from the next century. Theoretically speaking, future information, that material, is right there and can be obtained. Just as the future pattern of the body's development was already present when you were born, and that is undoubtedly actual and real.

Do not think that only past material can be obtained and future material cannot. Future material is right there and can be obtained just the same. It is like when you were in your mother's womb, what you would look like when you grew up was already determined. The pattern was already set; you just did not know it. If one day you can obtain future material through psychic means, then you can obtain a great deal of future technology and information. How useful and wondrous this would be for the development of our humanity.

Chapter 3: Association, Emotion, and a Different Frame of Reference (Part Two)

This is the second part of the interpretation of Chapter 3 of The Nature of the Psyche, which is Session 763 of the book. This was a session on Monday evening, January 5, 1976⁴, so the timeline has already reached 1976. They had already gotten through Christmas. At the beginning of the session, Rob said that yesterday, while they were driving out to the countryside for an outing, Jane suddenly questioned aloud, saying she did not know whether Seth dreamed. She said that if Seth dreamed, what would his dreams be like? Tonight at nine o'clock she told Rob that she thought Seth would weave her question into the dictation of this book to answer her.

Throughout the Christmas holiday, after they had enjoyed the Christmas tree, they took it down today. This holiday could actually be called a Seth holiday, because during this holiday, he had been receiving Seth material continuously. Then we begin looking at the verified dictation content of this session.

Seth said:

There are other ways of receiving information, then, besides those taken for granted.

So besides the sensory systems we are familiar with that can receive information, there are other ways, and there are other kinds of knowledge. Knowledge is not only what we know; there is more knowledge — I am not referring to specific knowledge, but to the kinds of knowledge. These are ways of organizing knowledge, ways of structuring knowledge, that you are generally not familiar with. We are not very familiar with them.

This is not just about learning new methods for acquiring knowledge, but rather a situation. He said:

This is not a new method of learning.

It is not that by using a new method of learning I gain a new way of acquiring knowledge. It is not a question of a new method, but a new situation, a new state. And in that new state, that new situation, the old methods must be temporarily set aside. Our traditional ways of acquiring knowledge must be set aside, and along with them, the knowledge connected to them must also be set aside — the whole thing is entirely different from our traditional knowledge systems and methods of acquiring knowledge.

He said he did not mean that at deeper levels of your consciousness there is another kind of knowledge. What he wanted to say was not merely that, because there are quite a few kinds of such knowledge. He said it is not just that there is a new kind of knowledge unknown to humanity; it is not merely that. These other kinds of knowledge, he said, many of them are biologically available to us — for example, mathematical knowledge, which we humans can easily obtain through education and learning, but which would be almost impossible for other species. He said these other kinds of knowledge, like mathematics, are available to our human biological structure. And some knowledge may be knowledge that our biological structure does not permit us to obtain.

These so-called esoteric traditions — that is, the ancient mystical religions — cannot be transmitted through language; they are all transmitted through telepathic means, through mind-to-mind transmission. There are many esoteric traditions. In a sense, Vajrayana can be considered one kind of esoteric tradition, but its transmission still goes through words, through certain special rituals and methods. But the true Vajrayana and the true esoteric traditions have no transmission through words. It is somewhat like the meaning in Zen Buddhism: the Buddha held up a flower and smiled⁵, and everyone understood his meaning. No words were needed — just a knowing smile, and the other side understood. So Zen Buddhism is also similar to one of the methods of the esoteric traditions.

These traditional esoteric traditions provided certain methods, methods that allow a person to set aside the generally accepted ways of perception — to cast aside the traditional six senses, just as Buddhism often uses methods to cut off your six sense roots — and they proposed certain methods, certain patterns. It is a method of practice. What is it actually doing? It is actually cutting off the traditional ways of receiving information, in order to obtain that new kind of knowledge. Such patterns can be used as containers for these other kinds of knowledge. However, even these containers will inevitably affect the shape of the information you receive. The container is actually not very good either, but there is no way around it, because to receive something you need a container. For example, our current human knowledge all needs to be transmitted through language and words. We cannot imagine any knowledge that could be taught or learned without words. Language and words are somewhat like the containers of knowledge. And this new kind of knowledge requires containers that our traditional perceptual organs do not have, so it needs some new containers. Therefore, the patterns he proposed are containers, containers for new knowledge.

He said some of these methods are very beneficial — note, not all — some esoteric methods are very useful, very helpful for you to obtain this knowledge. But they have also become too rigid, too authoritarian, leaving no room for deviation from the prescribed path. This is normal — if you know something about Tibetan Vajrayana, there are several kinds of Vajrayana, many kinds. For example, there is the Theravada Vajrayana, which is somewhat older, and the Tibetan Vajrayana, and some Vajrayana of Southern Buddhism, and so on. Vajrayana itself has many schools and types, but some are very strict, with strict systems and strict regulations, not very flexible. For example, their guru system and their empowerment system. Thus, dogmas were erected around them, so that only certain information was recognized and acceptable. Such a system no longer has the flexibility that originally gave birth to it. It has become especially rigid and dogmatic. It can only accept the kind of information it recognizes, and whatever it does not recognize, it considers wrong. And this itself actually goes beyond the most fundamental method by which we pursue truth.

Seth said a very simple sentence in the early sessions. At that time, Rob and Jane asked whether we humans have the possibility of approaching the truth or obtaining the truth, obtaining true knowledge. Seth said yes. Then they asked how we obtain the truth, and Seth answered with a single word — ask. What does that mean? It means you must have a desire and longing to obtain the truth. Without that desire, you cannot possibly obtain it. If you do not even have the desire to obtain something, how can you get it? So asking is the most central point. Why do I encourage everyone to ask more questions and communicate more? It is because this asking is the core. Asking represents that you have this desire, this longing to obtain the truth. Having studied this spiritual knowledge for so long, we know that if you do not even have this longing, you will never obtain it. So asking is the first step.

Later, as Seth transmitted more and more material, he began letter by letter, then word by word, character by character, then sentence by sentence, and eventually paragraph by paragraph. What you see now is already 1976, which is twelve years after Seth began transmitting material⁶. Later, Rob and Jane asked him again, what is the greatest obstacle to our obtaining the truth or true knowledge? At that time, Seth said one thing: if you have a rigid, inflexible mind, that is the only obstacle to your obtaining the truth. That is, you have too many rules and frameworks, you are too dogmatic, and you simply cannot accept things that go beyond your dogma. So you need to have a flexible mind, flexible beliefs. Remove all those rigid and dogmatic thoughts — that is the only way for you to approach the truth in your learning, and it is also the only thing that can possibly limit you.

So at this point Seth said that many of the methods within the esoteric traditions are very helpful for you to obtain that new kind of knowledge, but because they became overly dogmatic and rigid in the course of historical development, they limited the flexibility of obtaining this knowledge. The knowledge you obtain is all prescribed by them, or obtained according to their patterns and rituals, so they lost the flexibility and adaptability of those methods that were originally born for the purpose of obtaining knowledge that humanity did not have.

He said the kind of knowledge you rely on, that is, our ordinary everyday human knowledge, all needs to be put into language; there is no way not to put it into language. It is very hard for you to imagine accumulating any knowledge without using the language you understand; we would not know how to teach knowledge without language. At the same time, even if you remember all your dreams — we can remember our dreams — they are also attempts to be constructed through language. In our dreams, although it seems as if nothing is being said, the dreams are all in language, and that telepathic communication is also in the form of language, in a form you can understand. You can also use images; besides language, you can also use images. But these familiar images are taught from childhood, and therefore they are biased physical perceptions.

Those remembered dreams are meaningful and very valuable, but they have already been organized for you to some extent — what does "organized for you" mean? It means they have been put into a shape that you can more or less recognize. The dream has already been translated and interpreted, turned into a shape you can recognize so that you can know it. But beneath those levels, beneath the images, language, and dreams that you can recognize, you understand things in an entirely different form. This deep-level dream that you use for understanding is also packaged by the belief system of your three-dimensional world, and then transferred over into the way our ordinary senses, these six outer senses, receive things. If it were not transferred into this sensory mode, we would have no way to understand it.

Any information and knowledge must have a pattern. He said, for example, Ruburt's own painting — Ruburt's knowledge of his psychic abilities, and his love for Joseph, were all used to form a pattern. If you want to obtain knowledge beyond human knowledge, you need a pattern. He gave Jane as an example: first she had to paint. Although she had only been learning to paint for a few years, on the basis of having this painting foundation, she also had psychic abilities and knowledge, and love for her husband. She put all of these together and formed a pattern, and thus she attracted the Seth material; she automatically received it. See, he used the word "automatically" — she had not specifically set out to receive any Seth material; she automatically got it. And she wrote down those words that came too fast, almost too fast for her to keep up with, entirely automatic writing. Her painting technique and writing skills brought this material into clear focus, turning it clearly into words.

But this information itself has nothing to do with words; it is about a comprehensive understanding of the essence of painting, a direct knowing. That knowledge does not rely on words; it is just there. This is one of Seth's worldviews. And Jane directly made contact with Seth's worldview. This is a direct knowing, not obtained through understanding and learning, but it requires a special pattern to obtain this thing — that is, Jane had a certain painting skill, she had a very good foundation in writing, and she also had the wish to give her husband a book about Cezanne, plus her own psychic abilities, her spiritual abilities. All of this automatically formed. Ruburt used his own ability as a container, making all of the above into a container.

Session 763

Again:

Any individual can have direct knowledge of any such subject if he or she provides a suitable pattern through desire, love, intent, and belief.

Remember, he is talking about direct knowledge, not knowledge that you need to obtain through study. It is somewhat like one of the nine inner senses Seth has spoken about -- I think it was the sixth one, I cannot remember whether it was the fifth or the sixth -- the direct acquisition of concepts. His point is that everyone has this ability. You only need to adjust your own desire, love, intent, and belief, and if you provide a very good pattern, then you can obtain this direct knowledge.

Then Ruburt subsequently became curious about whether Seth dreams or not. Seth said, my usual state of consciousness is very different from yours -- I do not alternate between waking and sleeping the way you do, I do not have this distinction between waking and sleeping. When you become a pure energy state like the soul, you do not need to sleep. However, he said, I do have some states of consciousness that can be compared to your dream states. In these states of consciousness, I am less involved than in other states.

What does "less involved" mean? He goes on to say: if I said I controlled my dreams, you might have some idea of what I mean. Because you humans can also control your own dreams. Dream control is a very effective method -- dreaming with consciousness, bringing your own consciousness into the dream. But he said, I do not control my dreams, because when I dream I am conscious, I complete them -- I do not control them. You must understand this clearly. It is just like when we complete something in life. So his dreams are the same as our waking state. He is only drawing an analogy, as if we were dreaming, but in fact it is not a dream.

What you might call dreams involve images that exist beneath the dreams you remember. He made an analogy and comparison: you want to know whether I dream. First, my state of consciousness is different from yours -- I do not have the distinction between sleeping and waking. Second, I have some states of consciousness that can be similar to your dream states. In this state that you consider to be my dreaming, or what can be compared to your dream state, what is it? It is that I am not involved in too many things; I only remain within a relatively single event. He will explain later -- the level of consciousness where I dream corresponds to one level deeper than the dreams you humans can remember, beneath that dream.

He goes on to say, I have said before that there are many kinds of knowledge. There are many kinds of knowledge. Now, think of them as a state of knowledge. To perceive any one of them, a certain consciousness must adjust its frequency to it. He gives this example: in my waking state -- he put "waking" in quotation marks -- he said I operate on many levels of consciousness simultaneously. Seth's usual state of consciousness operates on many levels of consciousness, and thus deals with different systems of knowledge. He can be on different levels of consciousness at the same time. This is beyond our human level of understanding. How do I describe it? Let me give a crude example: it is like you are playing 12 games at the same time, playing 12 roles, entering 12 game settings -- not 12 identical games, but 12 completely different games -- and you are playing them all at once. I am telling you this is a crude example. Are the 12 games I just mentioned still on one level, one difficulty level, or within one consciousness space? But Seth is on different levels. If you have read Chapter 19 of Seth Speaks, where it discusses the levels of consciousness, then you know he is operating and dealing on different levels of consciousness.

Then he said, in the situation that can be compared to dreaming relative to you humans -- he said when I seem to be dreaming -- he added quotation marks:

I form a link that unites the consciousness of these many systems.

So what is he doing in his dream state? He is taking the knowledge obtained in the waking state -- "waking" in quotation marks -- in his ordinary state of consciousness, on so many different levels of consciousness, and linking them together during what you consider to be sleep. When I am awake, while operating within these 12 games, I do not have time to make links with the other games, because I cannot play a game and make links with others at the same time. I focus all my attention on operating and functioning on the level of consciousness I have entered. But when I sleep -- sleep in quotation marks -- in the dream state, I connect these different kinds of knowledge together. The linking between these different kinds of knowledge is completed through the process of what Seth calls his dreaming, so that all the knowledge can be strung together, forming something new, a new combination.

Seth said, when I wake again -- this waking is also in quotation marks -- I become consciously aware of those activities, that is, connecting those different levels of consciousness, linking them together. And I use them to enhance a dimension of my ordinary general condition: when I connect the experiences obtained from different levels of consciousness, I can obtain, through the combined and mixed experience, something that can enhance the dimensional space where Seth resides, to expand his dimensional space. He used the word "enhance" -- creatively expanding my experience of my own reality. This experiential knowledge from different levels of consciousness can expand his own experience of his own reality.

He said, what I learn, what I learn from these, is automatically transmitted to others like me, and their knowledge is also transmitted to me -- it is transmitted automatically between them.

This is very much like Tesla's autonomous driving. One of its functions is that every driver, in the process of driving, uploads their own driving experience, driving techniques, and skills through the Tesla onboard computer's automatic learning method, refined and optimized, to Tesla headquarters' cloud computing platform. After aggregation and optimization, when other drivers drive a Tesla on the same road segment using autonomous driving, the autonomous driving system downloads from the cloud, based on the experience of other drivers who manually drove that segment, combined with the autonomous driving algorithm, integrated together into the car, forming the autonomous driving method for that current road segment. So Tesla uses this kind of method: everyone uploads their own driving skills, and everyone shares this knowledge. This is the current backend computing mechanism of Tesla's autonomous driving.

And each of us is consciously aware of these transmissions. In the terms you are usually familiar with, what you think of as the conscious mind -- the conscious mind -- this kind of transmission can be called the conscious mind. In that way, there are many conscious minds, and between these conscious minds knowledge and information are transmitted to one another.

However, your prejudices are so deep that you ignore those conscious pieces of information that you have been taught are impossible. Therefore all of your experience is organized according to your beliefs. His point is that this method of transmission actually exists in you humans too, but because you humans do not accept this kind of direct knowledge, or this method of transmission on the level of consciousness, you do not consider it a transmission of experience. We say that our conscious mind is for survival -- you need to obtain enough resources, earn enough money, have a place to live, have a stable income. All of this is to keep your physical body alive. You think your conscious mind is only for this purpose, so when it has other functions, you do not accept it.

If you remember your dreams, if you consciously obtain knowledge from there and benefit from that knowledge, then your physical survival is also more assured -- the knowledge you obtain from dreams can also help you live better, and even better, obtaining knowledge that others do not have. This is not contradictory.

He said there is a level of dream life that is specifically for dealing with the biological condition of the body:

Not only giving you instructions concerning health problems, but giving you their reasons, and the methods to overcome them.

In your dreams, there is a level specifically for dealing with your physical condition. It can not only tell you why your body has a problem, but also tell you how to solve it. Intelligence about probable futures is also given to you, and it helps you make conscious choices.

I happened to see this morning in the QQ group a group member named Zhu Zifan sharing: the symptoms of otitis media that had troubled him for over a year suddenly got better in a dream. In the dream he was picking his ear and pulled out a small red string. Then he pulled it outward, and after pulling more than ten centimeters, the red string broke. Then he put his hand in and continued digging, and he found the end of the string again. He pulled outward again, and after another ten centimeters, it broke again. He did not give up, and reached in again, and felt another string end, and pulled outward again. This time he pulled out a section of black string -- the color of a bloodstain that had turned black -- and kept pulling and pulling until it came out. After it broke this time, he reached in again and there was nothing there; he could not feel the string end anymore. At that moment in his brain -- he was still dreaming at the time, remember this is a dream -- in the brain within the dream, he suddenly told himself, your ear problem is already healed. The otitis media that had troubled him for over a year was completely healed. Then at that moment he woke up, he woke up all at once. After waking up he touched his ear, and the night before when he went to sleep, this ear still had that oily, mucus-like substance seeping out. He had specifically dried it with a cotton swab, afraid it would leak everywhere while he slept. But when he got up in the morning and touched it again, after the night had passed, the ear was completely dry, nothing wrong at all. The ear problem that had troubled him for so long was completely healed.

So through this real case shared by someone, we can know that in dreams you do have this ability to solve problems. But what do we usually teach ourselves? You cannot be conscious in dreams -- since childhood you have been taught that in dreams you cannot be conscious, you are only passive, just some random stuff from the day, "what you think about in the day you dream about at night," meaningless things. Because you interpret the word "conscious" in this way, your understanding of the three words "conscious" is so biased and narrow, that in dreams you clearly are conscious, but you tell yourself you are not conscious. So much so that it only refers to this concept of your own prejudice -- the things you can understand and accept. What is prejudice? It is that you think in dreams your illness cannot be cured. How can dreams cure illness? How can you possibly have the same kind of waking consciousness in dreams? Dreams are completely uncontrollable; I have no idea what dream I will have. This rigid, fixed concept causes you to not accept that in your own dreams you are conscious.

What is the result of this? You do not have any culturally acceptable pattern of this kind. Because there is no such pattern, you have no container for that knowledge; you cannot contain it. It is like when someone teaches you some knowledge during the day, you learn something, you memorize it through memory, you write it down through notes and books, and you remember that you learned this knowledge. But in dreams, because you think you are not conscious, you think you cannot do more work in dreams, you cannot obtain further development, so in that case you do not have such a container to receive that knowledge. Even if that knowledge is given to you, you lose it. It is like holding a bottle without a bottom; the knowledge passes through and flows away. Without a container, it cannot settle into your knowledge, nor can it be used by you.

In your trance states, in your daydreaming, in your dozing, in your entering hypnosis, these states are all meant to suggest to you various different conditions that can occur from the standpoint of waking consciousness. He said trance states, lucid dreams, being hypnotized -- these states are all telling you: while you are awake, you can still enter some different levels and states of consciousness. They are different from your ordinary waking state, and different from your dreaming state. If you have been hypnotized you know this, and if you have daydreamed you know this -- what is daydreaming? It is dreaming while awake, in that half-dreaming half-waking state, basically after waking in the morning as if you fell back asleep for a short nap, in that process where you are neither fully asleep nor fully awake.

In each of these conditions, in each state of consciousness, reality -- that is, the physical world -- appears in another form. For example, your dream world is different from your waking world, and when you enter a hypnotic state it is different again. It always appears in another form. And in that regard, different laws apply in different worlds. On different levels of consciousness, in different states of consciousness, the laws that apply are also different.

In the dream state, far more changes occur. The changes in dreams are more complex and more numerous than in states like hypnosis, daydreaming, and trance. But for you, the key that opens the dream state is hidden in the waking state. So how can you obtain this dream knowledge, this knowledge from different levels of consciousness? This key is hidden in our waking state. Therefore our training in the waking state can help us obtain this knowledge in dreams.

Before you can begin to explore dreams, you must change your concepts about dreaming. Otherwise your own waking prejudices close that door -- you close it yourself.

He goes on to say:

As it is, you are only expressing a small portion of your entire personality.

He said my comments have nothing to do with the concepts you have accepted about the unconscious portion of yourself -- what I am saying is not that part of yourself that you consider unconscious. He is talking about the part of you that consciously obtains knowledge, not the part of your inner self. Your inner self has another part, the part directly connected to the entity; he is not talking about that part. Remember, he is still talking about the part of our conscious mind, the conscious mind, not the unconscious part beneath what we call the subconscious. You must understand this, do not confuse them.

He said your concept of the unconscious is so connected to your limited concept of the personal nature of personality -- connected in what way? So much so that if I say "unconscious," you think it is unconscious by nature, and then what I say to you becomes meaningless. He said it is as if you use one finger on one hand, and then you say this is a specific, appropriate expression of my personality. His point is, suppose your entire personality is your whole body -- of course including your thoughts and consciousness -- but at this moment you hold up one finger, and you say this finger represents my entire personality. Your current perception of yourself is at this stage. You only see this one finger of yourself, and then you take this finger to be your entire self, because you cannot perceive a larger picture.

This is very interesting. Another one of our group moderators, Yuanqi, gave an example: in another class, another teacher gave an example about the relationship between a big tree and its leaves. Our current life is like a leaf, and our entity is like the trunk of the big tree. A big tree sprouts every spring, growing green, tender new leaves. In autumn they turn yellow, and in the bleak autumn wind they fall to the ground and die. For the leaf, its life is a process from spring to late autumn. But for the big tree, it may have a lifespan of several hundred years. So for the leaf, it is like one of our reincarnations. But our leaf provides nutrition and energy to the big tree. If the big tree had no leaves, the big tree could not survive either. So the leaf is very important to the big tree. But can you say this leaf represents the big tree? No, it cannot. It is correct to say this leaf is a part of the big tree. But what kind of perspective should you have? What kind of angle? You need to be able to be a good leaf, to see the world from the leaf's perspective, and you also need the perspective of the big tree. You can also recognize that you are both the leaf and a part of the big tree; you are also the tree. And then from an even higher perspective, you are not only this tree, you are also a part of the whole of nature, a part of this forest, and you are even a part of this universe. You need to have this kind of cognition. You need the perspective of the leaf, the perspective of the big tree, and the perspective of the universe. On every level you can operate freely: on the level of the leaf, you use the knowledge of the leaf, how to do photosynthesis well; if you are a big tree, you use the knowledge of the big tree, how to root deeper, how to get enough sunlight in the forest; from the perspective of the universe, the tree itself is also a part of the universe. From the perspective of the entire universe, it releases oxygen and absorbs carbon dioxide, and is a key part of maintaining the ecological balance of the entire earth. Without these plants and trees, the oxygen on our earth would be exhausted. So from the perspective of the universe, the tree has another level of value.

Using this example of the tree has another benefit: it helps you understand the example he gives here -- using one finger to represent the entire personality is like using one leaf to represent the entire tree, which is incorrect.

He said:

You do not only have other minds -- you still have the remaining four fingers, you still have another hand, you still have two feet, you still have the entire body.

It is not only that your mind has functions that have not been used. Suppose one hand uses one finger; it cannot represent the remaining four fingers. Suppose those four fingers are a part of the mind of this hand, then one finger cannot represent the entire hand. But what he means is even more than that. You have even forgotten that you still have another hand -- you still have another mind, you still have one foot, and another foot. From the perspective of the mind, you have only used a part of some parts of your mind, not to mention that there are many more minds you do not even know exist.

You do have a brain, but you only allow it to use one radio station. The human brain itself can receive many, many radio stations, but you only let it receive one station, only allowing it to identify with one of many minds. Suppose your complete personality has 50 minds in total, but your brain only allows you to identify with your current personality, this current mind, and as for the remaining 49, you do not even know they exist.

He said it seems obvious to you that a person has only one mind, and you identify with the mind you use. You do not know there are other minds. And if you had another mind, then it would seem as if you must be another person -- your traditional concept holds that if you had other minds, would you not be another person? Because your current mind is what makes you feel that you are you. If another mind came along, would that not become another you, two of you existing?

A mind is a psychic pattern, or a spiritual pattern, through which you interpret and form this reality. Through one spiritual pattern, that is, through one mind, you have one kind of cognition of a world. If you can open three minds, then you can process three worlds at the same time, and simultaneously recognize the existence of three worlds. If you can open more minds, then you can see more realities. You can see your limbs, but you still have many minds you cannot see. Each mind can organize our reality in a different way, each one processing the part of knowledge related to that mind and what that mind believes. Just like what I said earlier: the big tree has the knowledge of the big tree, the leaf has the knowledge of the leaf. These minds all cooperate together, just like the entire big tree and every leaf -- there may be thousands upon thousands of leaves on this big tree -- and the entire trunk and branches cooperate together, enabling you to live through the physical structure of your brain.

When you use all of these minds, only then can you become fully aware of your surrounding environment, and only then can it be called full awareness. When you open all the minds, that is, when you open all the levels of your consciousness, only then can you say you have full awareness of your surrounding environment. You will perceive your world more clearly than now. You will perceive your world more keenly, more brilliantly, and more precisely. But at the same time, you also directly understand it -- you understand its essence, you understand the essence of your surrounding environment and world. Rather than your material perception of its substance -- you see through the material to the essence of this object or this event, rather than its external material form in our three-dimensional world.

The other states of consciousness natural to your other minds, you will also accept as yourself. You achieve your true individuality -- only then can a complete personality be formed. He has made it very clear here: only after all your states of consciousness are opened can you form a complete personality. And these are naturally inherent -- remember this firmly, these are naturally inherent. You do not need to search for them, you do not need to train to open them. They are already there; it is only a matter of whether you can open them. When you have opened all these naturally inherent states of consciousness, you will discover that the many worlds recognized by those states of consciousness are all your own worlds, and the you in them are all yourself, and then you can achieve a truly complete personality.

From a historical perspective, there were some ancient peoples, some very ancient peoples -- for example, similar to the Mayan civilization and so on -- including Atlantis and such, some ancient peoples had already achieved this goal; they could do it. But as far as you humans now are concerned, that is already too far in the past, so much so that you cannot find evidence of the existence of their knowledge. You cannot find evidence that they once had this knowledge.

He said over the centuries, various individuals have come very close to that state. After those ancient civilizations, over the centuries, there have still been some individuals who, through their own efforts and methods, achieved or approached this state, but they did not have the tools of expression to make it understood by members of the human race. After entering that state, it is very difficult to use a precise tool -- language as a tool cannot express it here -- so they did not have a very good tool of expression to let people, to let other members of the human race, understand. They had their own methods, but these methods required knowledge that other people did not possess as a prerequisite. What is the prerequisite? You must have the corresponding knowledge to open these things. These prerequisites are things other people do not have. In other words, if you want to learn quantum mechanics, you need to learn a lot of prerequisite knowledge first. If you say I will not learn the prerequisite knowledge, I just want someone at kindergarten level or someone with no schooling to explain quantum mechanics clearly to me so I can travel through time and space -- then there is no way to explain it clearly to you, because you do not even have the necessary foundational knowledge.

Then he said the content of our discussion today has ended. After a while, Seth immediately began a short discussion of a dream Jane had the previous night, but Jane had almost forgotten the dream. In this morning's notebook she wrote that she knew the dream involved a new, rather strange way of perceiving -- in the dream she had obtained a completely new, quite strange way of perceiving, different from the ways of perception she was familiar with, something she could not put into words at all. It was truly that this new way of perceiving could not be described in language.

Because this matter has a certain relevance to this chapter of Seth's, it is also a new way of perceiving. So you see, it was not without reason that Jane had this appropriate dream at the appropriate time. Rob wrote down Seth's comments about Jane's dream below.

Seth said, Ruburt had almost forgotten the dream from last night. That dream represented a breakthrough. A breakthrough in what? In that he at least consciously became aware that he could receive knowledge in another way, in a different way. He could not put it into language, and there was no appropriate pattern that could contain that kind of experience, yet he did receive it. His recent painting was not coincidental, because he was dealing with this non-verbal information -- painting is non-verbal, material organized in another way -- and thus it activated another part of his mind. In this Seth material, the dream and the painting are both one aspect, one part, of another kind of perception.

Your shared library experiment -- Jane building a library in her own mind, containing all kinds of knowledge and all kinds of things. This is very similar to the Week 5 lesson of our Master Key System 24-week course⁷, building a home of the psyche. If in the future we can also jointly build a city of the psyche, that is all possible. In the process of Jane building this psychic library, the cultivation of these skills and techniques can help her build a stage, enabling her to open up this new way of perception. Because you also added your encouragement -- Rob was also encouraging to her -- all of this will help Ruburt move forward toward a non-verbal understanding, and then help her move forward toward an understanding of a non-verbal mode of expression.

Then on another level, it will reorganize some of her beliefs. On this other level of consciousness -- for example, building a psychic library, or on other purely conscious levels -- she is reorganizing some of her beliefs. For example, painting is non-verbal, and on the level of painting she is also reorganizing some of her beliefs. She used to be a writer, expressing only through words, and now she discovers that she can express through painting, and can also express by building a psychic library in her mind.

This kind of perception cannot be conveyed in words. Be sure to remember, this kind of perception cannot be conveyed in words, it cannot be spoken, unless Ruburt forms appropriate language patterns through further experience. Otherwise, at her current level and state, it cannot be described in language.

On this point, he says that I am the touchstone. Here I think translating it as touchstone is not appropriate; it should be that magical golden finger that turns stone into gold. Seth's meaning is that I am that golden finger. He says I accelerated her spiritually to a certain degree, which enabled her and me -- Seth himself is an energy source from a different dimension -- to begin contact. This contact with energy sources of people from different worlds and dimensions will open up some biological changes in her brain. Certain parts of the brain undergo a kind of biological change, and this biological change is an ability that present-day humanity has not yet realized -- everyone possesses this ability, enabling the brain to connect to another mind. This requires a certain amount of learning, practice, and the fulfillment of certain conditions.

Finally Seth said loudly and humorously: Now then, this session is over, and I wish you a good night.

Regarding the content of this session, we have introduced it once again. I hope that this magical content he introduced -- whether Seth dreams or does not dream, the different levels of consciousness, and how our complete personality is composed of multiple levels of consciousness and multiple worlds of reality together, and so on, this whole series of content -- will be a great boost and inspiration to everyone. I hope you can think carefully, and seriously keep learning and tempering yourself in real life, so that when the opportunity comes, on some future day, you too can possess this same ability. You too can obtain any knowledge you wish to obtain, and that knowledge is not an extension of our existing knowledge; it is a completely different kind of knowledge -- to put it bluntly, it is not human knowledge, or not the way human knowledge is organized. It belongs to that kind of direct knowledge, that kind of conceptual knowledge that lets you understand directly.

Hello everyone, I am Mike. Today I will continue introducing to everyone the third part of the interpretation of Chapter 3 of the Seth book The Nature of the Psyche, that is, Session 764 of the book -- Monday, January 26, 1976, at 9:12 p.m. The content of this session is very important. I suggest everyone prepare a notebook to take notes, because it contains a large number of exercises. In the previous few sessions there were no exercises, but in this session several exercises appear all at once, and these exercises are all very important. So I hope everyone will take notes. Alright, let us look at the earlier content of this session.

Experiencing Yourself from the Top

Seth first says:

In certain respects, you can be said to experience yourself from the top.

What does "from above" mean? It means looking down at yourself from a higher vantage point. Therefore, in order to make use of information from some other intuitive levels, you must learn to experience other organizational structures that you are not usually familiar with. What you need to become familiar with is not just one way of looking at problems from above; you need to learn to use different organizational structures — that is, ways that may disrupt this top-down, hierarchical structure. Because if you want to gain more experience, or more of that other kind of information — the different kind of knowledge he speaks of — you must learn to break down this existing, conventional organizational structure.

For example, we often feel that dreams seem meaningless, and that is because of your ignorance of the symbolism and organization of dreams. For instance, you may misunderstand apocalyptic information — "apocalyptic" meaning information given to you from a higher level — you misunderstand this information because you organize and construct it according to your usual conscious manner. Suppose your higher self, your inner self, your soul, your entity, gives you some information from a higher level, yet you misunderstand it because you use your ordinary, everyday way of life to understand and construct this information. As a result, many valuable and highly practical insights that could have been used go astray and are not correctly understood by you.

So I would suggest some simple exercises that can allow you to directly experience, in a different way, this feeling of your own existence. What he means by "direct experience" here is to bypass your everyday way of organizing and structuring things, to bypass the organizational methods you are ordinarily familiar with, and to adopt a direct way of experiencing the feeling of your own existence.

The Art of Consciousness

All the different organizations that the psyche uses can, at least on one level, be compared to different arts. He says the psyche's various forms of organization—the forms in which it organizes information, or organizes your experience—you can understand them as different art forms. He gives an example: music is not better than painting, and a sculpture cannot be compared to a musical note, because they are different kinds of art.

Session 764

I am not saying that one mode of organization is better than another.

Seth is not saying that this direct experience, this mode of organizing experience that I am now having you practice, is better than the mode of organization you use in your daily life. I am not saying it is better. Seth's point is that, for you, you should experience these more, or experience them from another angle, rather than recognizing only one way. In other words, you are a musician, but you cannot look at everything and understand this world only from a musician's angle; sometimes you also have to switch to a painter's, a writer's, an athlete's, or an ordinary businessperson's angle to understand it, and you cannot rigidly perceive things only from a painter's angle.

You have simply specialized in one of the many arts of consciousness.

He describes your different ways of organizing material as an art of consciousness — that is, the different artistic forms of expression of your consciousness.

This recognition can be greatly enriched by practice with knowledge of the other arts.

Your usual state of consciousness or your usual angle of thinking about problems is only one of the many facets of your consciousness that you use, or one of the different ways your consciousness organizes itself. He is now telling you that your familiarity with and experience of other modes of organizing consciousness will greatly enrich your understanding of that original single artistic form of organization. It is like you used to be a painter, and now you are asked to learn to play the piano. Playing the piano itself may not help painting very much, but we often say that all arts are connected — your experience of playing the piano may produce some unexpected effects on your painting. Conversely, it will not weaken your mastery of painting technique; on the contrary, it will greatly enhance it.

Then he first says that these other modes of organization are fundamentally unrelated to time. Only this mode of organization we are familiar with is related to time. Apart from the mode of organization of the three-dimensional world we are familiar with, all the other modes of organization are unrelated to time, and instead deal with the processes of emotion and association. They all deal with the processes of emotion and association, but the ways of dealing with them are not the same either; there are many ways of dealing with them. For example, when you understand how your own associations work — association is the relatedness between events — when you understand what it is that connects your own associations, then interpreting your own dreams becomes much easier. When you can discover the inner connection behind events, your interpretation of dreams will become very easy, and eventually you will turn them into an art, treating this interpretation as a form of artistic expression.

Then he says there are several ways to do this practice, and you can try them all. The purpose of this practice will be to experience emotions and events outside of time sequence as much as possible. Because ordinarily we experience emotions and events within time sequence; we feel that things happen one after another. And how do you experience these emotions and events outside of time? Below he lets us achieve this through some exercises.

Cellular Comprehension

He said, as I have mentioned many times before, this cellular comprehension -- the cells themselves have a very deep capacity for understanding -- deals with probabilities and encompasses past and future, so at that level of activity, time as you understand it does not exist. I have told you this before: every cell contains the entire developmental history of humanity and the entire essence of humanity -- you are of course included in this human history -- so it includes all probabilities of time. Specifically speaking, all the developmental potentials of your life, including what you will look like in the future, are known to every cell. Every cell already knew at your birth what you would look like when you grew up, what you would look like at each age, and that is why these cells can follow this template, this mold, and ultimately grow into your appearance. Otherwise, how would your appearance come about? Randomly? That is impossible.

He said, however, you are not consciously aware of this kind of data -- about cellular consciousness, about cellular comprehension and the existence of probabilities -- you actually cannot consciously be aware of it.

He said the psyche can also be said to be not limited by events. The psyche is at the other end of the scale -- at the other end of the time scale and space scale you are normally familiar with; it is not within the scope of time and space as you understand it, so it is not limited by events. You need to understand this well: the psyche is not limited by events. It is not that certain events will affect something about your psyche, or that the development of the psyche must depend on the occurrence of some event -- that is something in your understanding. Our life trajectory is composed of a series of events, and we think life is affected by these events: from birth to death, we experience a series of events, and we feel life is inevitably affected by them, and then we largely believe that our psyche, the growth of our psyche, is also affected by these events. He tells you: it is not limited by events. Be sure to remember, you are not limited by events.

What does it mean to be not limited by events? It means that when an event occurs, its earlier occurrence and later occurrence, as well as your attitude toward it and understanding of it after it occurs, can all completely transcend the event itself. I hope you can understand this sentence: it is transcending the event itself, rather than being pulled and influenced by the event, or even limited by it. Simply put, when something happens, from the perspective of material life, from the real three-dimensional world, it may indeed have an impact -- for example, you are injured, you fall ill, your family undergoes a change; these do have an impact on your three-dimensional world, and that is real. But does it have an impact on your psyche? Does it limit it? Does the occurrence of this event limit the growth of your psyche, limit the cognition of your psyche, or affect the expression of your psyche? There is no impact.

He said, however, usually your own stream of consciousness will lead you to think of certain events. Normally, if you consciously follow the flow of consciousness, it will, in terms of the associative connections between events, link one event to another. The events you associate with go beyond your ordinary sequence, beyond our cognition of time. When you associate other events, you do not associate them according to the order of time; you may associate them according to the type of emotion, or according to the nature of the events, or according to the location where the events occurred -- all different.

For example, he said you might receive a letter from this Aunt Beixi, and within a very short time, it triggers you to think of things from childhood, because she will mention what you were like as a child. Many images fly across your mind, and many memories from your childhood will fly past.

You might be curious whether your aunt next year will make the anticipated trip to Europe.

This is something in the future. That thought might give rise to an imagined image of the future -- that is, this Aunt Beixi may have told you that she is going to travel to Europe next year. So this letter can not only trigger your associations with childhood memories, but also trigger an image of the future event of next year's European trip.

All of these thoughts and images will be colored by the emotions connected with this letter and with the events that you and your aunt have designed together.

That is, all your past events, and the event of your aunt going to travel to Europe in the future, and the interactions you once had with your aunt when you were young, will all be colored by your emotions. Remember, colored by your emotions. These events, whether they are historical events that happened in the past or future events that have not yet occurred, will all be colored by your emotions. What does coloring mean? If your childhood was very miserable, when recalling childhood you will think of miserable experiences; if your childhood was very happy, and your interactions with Aunt Beixi were very pleasant, you will be colored by this pleasant emotion. You will have the same feeling about the future.

Next time when you find yourself in a similar experience, when associations flow freely, then become more aware of what you are becoming.

I do not know how this sentence was translated; it may be problematic. What he wants to say is: when you discover similar experiences, when this kind of association automatically links up -- one thing reminds you of another, you think of Aunt Beixi, you think of childhood memories, you think she might come to visit -- then observe what you are most concerned with in the middle of this, and what you become more aware of.

Try to sense the fluidity involved.

You should try to sense this fluidity: what associations such a letter leads you to, what things you associate with, how you associate to them -- this kind of fluidity, a string of images flying through your mind.

You will understand that the events are not necessarily structured according to ordinary time, but according to emotional content.

When you carefully observe these associated events, you will discover that they are associated according to emotional content, rather than according to the chronological order of occurrence or their distance from you.

He said, for example, the thought about your own next birthday -- how you plan to spend your next birthday -- it can immediately take you to think of past birthdays: how you spent your last birthday, how you spent your birthdays as a child, or a series of birthdays at age 20, 30, 3, 7, and the images may reappear in your mind. A unique sequence of your own emerges, and this sequence is not from later to earlier. For example, if you are 30 this year, when you think about turning 31, you will not immediately think of your last birthday, then 29, then 28 -- it is not like that. In associating about birthdays, you might directly jump to your 20th birthday, or 18th, or 3rd, or 10th -- not necessarily any particular age. This sequence appears according to the intensity of your emotions, rather than according to chronological order.

The sequence will be determined by emotional associations, the same as those followed in dreaming itself.

This is what we do in dreams; in dreams, this is how the time in our dreams is constructed.

He continued:

Do you remember what clothes you wore to work three days ago? Do you remember what breakfast you ate a week ago? Do you remember who you sat next to in kindergarten? What was it that scared you recently? Are you afraid of sleeping? When were you ever afraid of sleeping? Did your parents ever hit you? When did they hit you? What did you do after lunch yesterday? What color shoes were you wearing three days ago?

You only remember important events and details.

Your emotions start your memories, and they also organize your associations.

Emotion is the key here: emotions start your memories; they are triggered by emotions; and emotions also organize your associations.

Your emotions are initiated by your beliefs, and they attach to each other.

Emotions and beliefs are attached together, so much so that certain beliefs and emotions seem to be merged into one; they cannot be separated, and they are automatic and spontaneous -- the moment you think of certain emotions or certain beliefs, they trigger the same associativity between them, merged together. Your beliefs and emotions pair up and attach to each other.

Next time when the opportunity presents itself, when you recognize in your mind a fairly strong emotion, then let your associations flow. Events and images will leap into your mind, transcending the form of time.

When you normally have this kind of opportunity -- for example, thinking of birthdays or other things -- you should seize this opportunity to observe. Observe what? Observe how the events you associate with leap beyond the limits of time and jump into your mind according to the intensity of emotion.

You will clearly see the connection between emotions and events.

You will quickly see the connection between the emotions you feel and the events. But others will not be so obvious, because they were not remembered, so they are not so obvious. So he asks you to observe what the emotion behind your association of events is, or what the belief is that triggers it.

Experience these events as clearly as you can, and then deliberately change their order.

After you have brought out events from different times, go and experience these events once. Then deliberately change their order: for example, you think of one thing, and then follow it with a memory that actually happened earlier, pretending that the future event happened earlier than the past event.

The Second Exercise: The Picture of Your Life

All right, let's not worry about what he says next for now -- what he said above is just the lead-in to the exercise below. Now let's focus on how this exercise is done, and I hope you will do it as soon as possible after listening to this class.

Imagine a very large painting in which the most important events of your life are clearly depicted.

First, the first step: you should view it as a series of scenes -- the important key events of your life are all clearly painted. You should first think of it as a sequence of scenes, from your birth to the present, one after another. Then:

Arrange them into small squares.

For example, you divide this canvas into many small squares, and each important event in your life is painted as a picture in one small square. You can view it as a comic strip. These events must be truly significant to you. For example, if a graduation ceremony means nothing to you, then don't paint it -- because abroad, graduation ceremonies are very important; elementary school, middle school, high school, college, every graduation ceremony is taken seriously, and generally parents attend as an important event. But if it has no meaning for you, you don't need to paint it. Only paint the things that are truly important to you, square by square. Start painting this picture from the upper left corner. The upper left corner is the first event you remember that had meaning in your life, in chronological order, and finally the lower right corner is the end -- paint from the upper left all the way to the lower right, from left to right, then the second row again from left to right, all the way up to the present.

This picture is something you imagine in your mind; it is done through imagination, not actually painted on a board. So you can see that the exercises we did a while back -- including the 24-week Master Key⁸ exercises and those meditation exercises -- all have important significance for these classes. Because if those exercises are not enough, if your meditation ability is not enough, these mental images are very hard to produce. Having you construct the important events of your life in your mind seems like an impossible task, but if you have that foundation, it is not so difficult, though it may still take some time to think through carefully.

Then after you have arranged them in order, what do you do next?

Reverse it completely, so that your earliest time becomes the lower right corner.

Starting from now, begin painting from the lower right corner, and take the earliest event -- for example, something from when you were in kindergarten -- which was originally in the upper left corner, and now repaint it in the lower right corner. Reverse the order completely and paint it again, recombining the same events all over again.

After you have done this, ask yourself:

Which scene evokes the strongest emotional response in you?

After you have arranged both the forward and reverse time sequences, which scene can evoke the strongest emotional response in you? You must be honest about this, you must be truthful, because no one can see you, and no one is observing or judging you, so don't deceive yourself. Then:

Tell yourself that it will grow larger and larger.

Imagine that the scene that evokes the strongest emotional response in you is growing larger and larger within the whole picture. Originally it was just one square, the same as the other events; now it is getting bigger and bigger, and you watch its size slowly increase in your mind.

Some kind of dynamics will be involved here.

Some kind of dynamics -- it is not explained here, but you will know once you practice it yourself: it is the driving force behind your emotions. So much so that this scene will attract certain elements from the other scenes -- as it grows larger and larger, it will absorb certain elements from the other scenes of your life.

Then allow the other scenes to dissolve.

Because those scenes have already contributed their most essential parts to this most important scene.

The main picture will absorb elements from all the other scenes, until you finally have an entirely different picture.

For this one small square to grow larger, there must be something pushing it from behind, some kind of dynamic force, making it grow. As it grows, it covers the things in the other small squares; in the process of covering them, it absorbs the elements it needs from the other small squares, and then constructs a larger picture. In the process of absorbing those elements, you let the other small squares, those events, dissolve, and they become this one thing -- your life up to now is represented by this one scene.

Of course, this one scene still encompasses the core elements of all the important scenes you just listed. This small picture has grown larger because it absorbed some of the storylines and emotions of the other scenes; in effect, it has absorbed everything else -- though of course this scene and this emotion remain primary. In the end, this picture will also change: as it absorbs elements from elsewhere, the picture is also transforming, and ultimately it will form a picture that is different from the original small square scene, an entirely different picture -- somewhat like a picture composed of many small square scenes, yet combined and united in a completely new way. It's like if you have studied painting: for example, if I have several thousand photographs, I can use these several thousand photographs to piece together one scene, where each photograph represents one scene, and after several thousand are pieced together they form a new scene, and this new scene in turn encompasses the elements of all the scenes. That is what he is asking you to do in this exercise.

You must do this exercise. If you only read about it, you will not gain any experience from the actual practice.

Don't just listen to me talking about it with excitement, or read Seth writing about it with excitement. Just reading is useless; you have to practice it yourself, and you should do this exercise several times. I think I have explained this exercise quite clearly; if it is not clear to you, you can go back and review how this exercise is done from the beginning. In your daily life, find time to do it more, and practice more.

Third Exercise: Constructing a Daydream

He now begins the next exercise. He is now consciously having you construct a dream. If you have seen the movie Inception⁹, you will know that dreams can be constructed.

Tell yourself that you will construct a dream, and begin with the first image or thought that comes to mind.

For example, you now begin by saying: I am now going to create a dream. Then whatever first image or first thought appears in your mind, take it as the first scene and the first image in your dream. This is easy to do, right? Quite easy. You just grab hold of all the thoughts in your mind, make them concrete, give them form, and turn them into a scene in the dream -- grab one as it comes. From now on, dream with your eyes open, in a waking state. Take hold of every thought that appears in your mind and construct it into the first scene, the second scene of the dream.

When you have finished your own daydream, use free association to interpret it for yourself. You can set a time for yourself, say one minute, or two minutes, whatever time you design; you can start with one minute and gradually lengthen it. Suppose the time is up, you have constructed a daydream, you roughly recall the dream, and then you begin, through free association, to explain the dream to yourself. You must interpret the dream for yourself: What does this dream actually mean? These images, these scenes, these thoughts that appeared in my dream -- what significance do they have for me? You should try to interpret the dream you just constructed. Isn't this exercise quite fun? If you do this exercise, it is very interesting, and you will learn how to create dreams.

Resistance in the Exercises

Some of you, when doing these exercises -- including the first, second, and third ones mentioned earlier -- will encounter some resistance. You enjoy reading about these exercises, but you will find all sorts of excuses to keep yourselves from actually trying them. You think the exercise is very good, and you say, "Ah, this exercise is really great, but I won't do it" -- you have all kinds of reasons. If you are honest with yourself, you will find a feeling of reluctance; even when you do it, you are not entirely willing. Why is that? Because certain properties of consciousness are being brought into play -- some things in your consciousness that you do not ordinarily use now have to be used, and those are the opposite of your usual conscious experience. We assume that consciousness only uses one part of itself; now it is using another part, the part opposite to it, so your present consciousness instinctively rejects it. That is all right -- if it rejects it, let it reject it; just do it first, and then talk about it. Once you do it, you will get used to it. Many things are like this. Seth gives you advance warning: it is normal to feel a bit reluctant, it is normal to feel somewhat compelled against your will; overcome it and give it a try.

He says, you might say that you perhaps feel as though you have crossed some bottom line -- gone beyond a part of what you are ordinarily familiar with.

You have stretched that vaguely sensed psychic muscle.

You are exercising a psychic muscle that you do not ordinarily exercise -- your psyche also needs to be worked out. We ordinarily use only one aspect of the psyche, and we use it very well: our cognition of the three-dimensional world's sequence, time and space, our logical thinking ability, our reasoning ability, our analytical ability, our associative ability -- following the familiar set of routines, we use these with great proficiency. But there are other muscles we do not use. Just like working out, many muscles cannot be exercised unless you consciously train them. And at this point, it is precisely those muscles you do not ordinarily use that need to be trained.

The purpose is not to carry out these exercises perfectly.

The purpose of having you do the exercises is not to make everyone perform each exercise extremely well, with the final images produced being vivid and lifelike; including the dream-construction process just mentioned, it is not about constructing it perfectly. Be sure to remember:

My purpose is to acquaint you with a different method of experiencing and perceiving.

When you practice in the way I have suggested, no matter what the result of the exercise is, you are already using a completely different way to experience and perceive the events you are ordinarily familiar with -- that is his purpose, not the result of the experiment.

The Christian View and "Idle Hands"

He says:

You have been taught not to mix waking and dreaming conditions.

From childhood you were taught not to mix them. But when he just had you do that daydreaming exercise, wasn't he asking you to dream while awake? Wasn't he asking you to mix waking and dreaming conditions? Yes. From childhood you were taught, "Don't daydream" -- that daydreaming has no meaning and no use. But now Seth is telling you to practice daydreaming. Isn't that completely opposite to what you were ordinarily taught?

You have been taught to focus all of your attention clearly, ambitiously, and energetically in a certain way, so that daydreaming, or mixing and matching various modes of consciousness, seems shoddy, negative, stagnant, and lazy.

Then he says:

The idle hand makes room for the devil.

He says this is an old Christian maxim. From childhood you were taught that you must not daydream -- whether during school or at any other time. Why? Because daydreaming gives us the feeling of being lazy, negative, stagnant, distracted -- daydreaming is the very representative of a wandering mind. In class the teacher says, "Where has your mind wandered off to?" The same when doing homework -- you often sit there in a daze, not knowing where your consciousness has drifted. At such times parents and teachers criticize us: stop daydreaming. And what we are ordinarily taught is that we should focus our attention, as if pumped full of adrenaline, and work hard at studying and at serious, earnest work in real life. Yet the thoughts in your daydreams are disorderly and chaotic -- you will know once you do the exercise in a moment. The things that come out of it are strange and varied, everything under the sun, seemingly completely unrelated to your life, and many are even stale old matters from the past. Those things that happened years or decades ago truly have no meaning for you anymore, so why do they still surge up endlessly in your mind like waves of thought, like ten thousand horses galloping? So your conscious mind tells you that digging up these stale old things has no meaning at all -- this is what you were taught from childhood.

He says that, unfortunately, these Christian views have been emphasized more than others. Christianity contains many views, and some views have been emphasized more than others by you; the example he gives is this one. And what is that maxim based on?

It is based on your belief that you are evil.

Because you believe yourself to be evil, this self needs to be disciplined and turned toward constructive activity -- that is, toward doing positive, meaningful things. If you believe your essence is evil, then if you are not doing positive things, you will surely do bad things. If you believe your essence is good, then being idle is just being idle, and being idle is also doing good -- your essence is that of a good person, and anything you do when bored or idle is a good thing. Only if you believe you are evil, and need to be disciplined and restrained at all times, doing good deeds, positive deeds, altruistic deeds, otherwise you might accidentally do something bad -- if that is your belief system, then this maxim comes into being.

He says:

Such a belief in the self as disgusting prevents many people from any exploration of the inner self.

From childhood you were taught that you are inherently evil, that your inner being is filthy, and this prevents you from exploring your own inner self. Because what is there to explore in a filthy, evil self? You can barely keep it hidden, let alone explore it. So this is a false belief. Christianity, as well as certain other religions, says you are born with original sin, that you are evil, and only through later learning can you become good, only by upholding precepts and practicing can you become good; if you do not uphold precepts, do not practice, do not follow the religious rules, then you are evil. The various precepts in Buddhism -- the premise is the assumption that you are a bad person, which is why you need to uphold precepts; if you were a very good person, what precepts would you need to uphold? Everything you do already follows the principles of the universe and the laws of nature; you yourself are the precepts. The premise of upholding precepts is that you are a bad person, an evil person, someone who will do bad things the moment no one is watching or restraining you. Does such an assumption not prevent you from exploring inward?

And thus it prevents people from any direct experience that could give them evidence to the contrary. What is evidence to the contrary? Originally your inner being is good, loving, and luminous, but they frighten you and do not let you explore it. It is like there is a dark room in the bottom of your heart, and they say a devil lives inside it, so you frighten yourself into believing there really is a devil inside; but what lives inside is goodness, light, and love, and you dare not look, afraid that if you open the door the devil will come out. If you dare not explore, you will never find the evidence to refute them, because you will never know whether it really is a devil inside. Whatever people say, you believe; they speak with such certainty, and so you truly believe it.

Sex and Association

He says:

If you are afraid of yourself, if you are afraid of your own memories, you will block the process of association.

Why do you feel reluctant when doing the exercises I suggested? It is because you block the process of association. You are afraid that these associations will bring back things that you think should best be forgotten -- things you think ought to be forgotten. These things are usually sexual. Seth is quite direct here.

Some people treat sex as the only area of strong energy with which they connect, and so it becomes a focus for all their beliefs about themselves.

When doing some of these exercises, you may encounter masturbation, homosexual or lesbian imagery, or merely a sexual fantasy. Then as soon as you think of these, you immediately retreat, because your beliefs tell you they are evil -- your past life experience and traditional moral education tell you these things are evil. So this is where the inner resistance appears during the exercises, because you are afraid that this free association will lead you to things you do not want to associate.

He gives the example that in some people's life experience, sex is their strongest area of energy -- this is a very important point, and it cannot be avoided or denied. For example, many women treat marital happiness and building a happy family as the only or main goal of life. For a woman, does a happy marriage and family necessarily mean there is something sexual in it? If it is a sexless marriage, will she regard it as happy? Of course, we cannot rule out some Platonic love or marriage, or some sexless marriages. But is a sexless marriage what she truly likes and wants? Take Cai Qin and Yang Dechang, for example: in their ten-year sexless marriage¹⁰, in the end Cai Qin suddenly discovered that Yang Dechang had been unfaithful with another woman and even had a child, and Cai Qin ultimately broke down -- she herself did not like a sexless life. So I also touched on this point, and Seth also points out: do not avoid this issue; it is also a necessary experience in your life development.

In part of most people's life goals, sex, or the strongest energy area of life, is closely connected with sex, except that it is hidden by you. You have forgotten that your life goals are entirely linked with sex; you will feel this is shameful -- "I am a dignified person, how could I connect my main life goal with sex?" This is true for women; for men it is even more obvious and externalized: many men's life goals and motivations are partly based on cravings for wealth, power, or such things, and some men turn them into a craving for women -- the craving for the opposite sex becomes the only driving force they pursue in life. I saw a news story a couple of days ago, I forgot who it was, seems like a very rich man in Europe, some tycoon, and he said very frankly: my driving force in life is not mansions, not scenery, not wealth, and not power; my driving force in life is women. This is a person who dares to face himself. Actually, in many men's subconscious, the main goal of life struggle is to acquire, as much as possible, the beautiful opposite sex he considers desirable; this is his main motivation in life. If you remove this motivation, a large part of his drive to strive in life is gone.

This is a very interesting thing. Seth directly points out that some people treat sex as their strong area of energy; here he does not mean everyone. If you are not such a person, that is fine; you do not need to be proud, nor to mock or despise those who are; there is no high or low, noble or base distinction here. If you are such a person, there is nothing shameful; it is normal. So what Seth means by this passage is that when you do these exercises, do not stop just because you associate to sex-related things -- you must face this matter calmly. Sex itself is not evil, nor shameful; rather, you were educated from childhood to regard it that way.

Then here he specifically gives a reminder:

For the same reason, you do not remember, or do not want to remember, your own dreams.

For what kind of reason? It is that you feel your own inner self is evil, filthy, and unbearable. For that reason, you also do not want to remember dreams. He says you do not remember, or do not want to remember -- he says the reason you do not remember...

Many people do not remember their dreams, and there may be one main reason: you do not want to remember them. Because in dreams you are completely free from the control of the logic of the three-dimensional world, and there is not even camouflage; you will very directly dream about many things. At this time you will feel very awkward, because in dreams many scenes appear that you are unwilling to admit in three-dimensional reality. Some people dream that they have sex with someone who is not their husband or girlfriend, or all sorts of sexual fantasies, even incest, with celebrities, idols, beyond time and space, or things like masturbation. These things make people feel filthy, evil, and contemptible, so people consciously dare not face their own dreams, choose to forget them, and say, "I cannot remember my dreams."

Because dreams are entirely beyond your control, many people tell themselves that they very much want to discover the nature and extent of their own psyche, but they do not know why they seldom succeed. They say with their mouths that they really want to discover what they actually are, but they find that they seldom succeed in discovering their own essence. Why? Do you know why now? They are blocking themselves. When they truly go to face their real selves, they do not dare -- they truly do not dare.

I once heard Teacher Ma Guanzhong talk about Seth. A student in class voluntarily brought up that he had discovered, and told Teacher Ma, that facing himself was something extremely, extremely terrifying, beyond anything he could imagine. Teacher Ma also said, yes, it is like that. Teacher Ma said, when I face myself, I also feel it is terrifying, and this is normal. Everyone, when first facing the real self, will be startled; this is normal, do not feel embarrassed. You must bravely face yourself; that is the real you.

If you ask yourself what the psyche is, that you whom you regard as evil -- the "evil" you in quotation marks, that you whom you think is not good -- that is the psyche, that is part of the psyche. How can you deny it? It is the universe and all things; it is this earth; it is this world; it is the source of everything in the universe. This is normal. Why do you deny it? For example, if you are a young girl and you want to sleep with a boy, that is entirely natural; that is what the psyche wants to do. If a boy likes a certain girl, that is also what the psyche wants to do. If the psyche did not want to do it, how could you have such a thought? Why do you insist on seeing it as ugly, disgusting, and filthy? Why must it be lofty and noble, donating to Project Hope, doing charitable activities -- only that is you, only that do you approve of, only that is a part of you? Yet the other part you resolutely spit on, deny, frantically cover up, and even despise, unwilling to admit that it is part of yourself. When others expose it, or when you yourself discover it, you become angry from shame, full of regret and shame. Why cannot you directly face that it is also part of you? This is what Seth means.

These beliefs -- convincing himself that "he is ugly and evil" -- these beliefs must be uprooted. Remember this firmly: these beliefs must be uprooted. If this belief is not removed, you will never dare to face yourself truthfully, never dare to face yourself honestly. In The Nature of Personal Reality, Seth also mentioned the same topic: you must face yourself honestly; this is the most important rule. So what is the belief to be uprooted here? It is that "you are evil, some of your thoughts are evil, and some of your thoughts are correct." Then you do not dare to accept that all your thoughts are correct, legitimate, and existing. Do not label them right or wrong, good or bad, evil or whatever. If you do not label them and do not discriminate among them, then it is fine; they are all part of your psyche. Men and women are the same.

If you cannot honestly face the vast dimension of your own biological nature -- if you do not dare to face that biological part of yourself -- your biological nature is also an expression of a part of the psyche. You will say, I only acknowledge the psyche part of me, the wise part of me, the part that transcends the ordinary and has left animality behind; only that part is the refinement and essence of my psyche. As for the animal part -- gluttony, love of comfort, liking the opposite sex, laziness -- these are not parts of my psyche. If you do this, is there still a discriminating mind in you? If you do not dare to honestly face the vast dimension of your biological nature, the attributes of your biological nature, then you will inevitably be unable to explore the vast dimension of the psyche, because they are one; they are within one dimension. In other words, the biological needs and desires you have right now are all instigated behind the scenes by your psyche. If you do not dare to investigate them, then you cannot investigate the things of the psyche either.

This blocking of association is a very important factor that prevents many people from exploring the inner self. The main factor why many people cannot explore the inner self is that they block themselves.

Seth says that the psyche's organization is far broader than most of your conscious beliefs about yourselves. In its way, it is more rational. You think it is irrational, chaotic, intuitive, and without logic, but actually your thinking ability is insufficient, your computing ability is insufficient. From the psyche's point of view, its way is more rational, while your way is clumsier. The way you associate life experiences according to time sequence and moral constraints, which you think is smart, is clumsy from the psyche's point of view, or more limited. But the way the psyche actually organizes events, using emotion as the bond and the intensity of emotion as the core, is actually more rational and more intelligent than you think.

Many people are afraid that they will be swept away by inner exploration. They feel that once they look inward, all they see are these things, all biological needs and desires at the bottom, and these biological desires are still very strong; they fear these desires will sweep them away. They discover that within themselves there are not the noble things they imagined, glittering and shining; instead there are things they usually avoid. Will they go mad? Actually there is no need to go mad. Because, as Seth says:

The physical stance of the personality and the body is stably rooted in this alternate kind of organization.

What is an alternate organization? It is the way of organizing events by emotion, by the content, category, and nature of events, rather than by time and the logic of our waking state. Simply put, it is the way of organizing events according to the psyche or the dream state. This is the foundation of why we are human and why our physical bodies can live in this world. The reason you can live in this world is that you are rooted in the dreaming state. Why would you go mad? Without these things, how could your present physical life exist?

There is nothing wrong with the conscious mind.

Do not think it is not good, not high-level enough, not noble enough, not morally strong enough, too low. It has no flaw in itself; you just put a lid on it, allowing it to be conscious and think only in this way, and not to be conscious of more. You will say, consciousness here is safe, and consciousness there is unsafe. "Here" means within your logical range, within your waking logic; you feel it is safe to use your consciousness. In dreams, using your consciousness is unsafe. This is you putting a lid on yourself; you think that area is unsafe, so it is best not to touch it.

Many of you believe it is safe to build an atomic bomb.

Otherwise we would not have built them. Where did all the atomic bombs in the world come from? Why build so many? Because you think it is safe to build atomic bombs; we can control them; we humans have reason and intelligence to use nuclear weapons well, and will not, without cause, like madmen, become angry from shame and take out atomic bombs to throw at the other side. You think atomic bombs are safe, but are atomic bombs really safe? How could they be safe?

And Seth says:

But to use your dreams as another method of operating in daily life is considered insane.

His meaning is that in your daily lives you think atomic bombs are safe, but using the way of organizing events, associating, and thinking from your dream state, applied to real life, is considered insane. If someone does things that way, you think he is crazy. Seth points out that you do not think building atomic bombs is crazy, yet you think doing this is crazy. But atomic bombs really can destroy you.

Consciously being aware of your viruses, wars, and disasters is considered good.

You think it is normal to be aware of these disasters, epidemics, great plagues, even wars and earthquakes, and you can depict them vividly and horrifyingly. Now it has become so terrifying that the whole world has shut down, and you think this is right, that for the good of humanity it is normal to spread fear and horror. But on the other hand, the part of your conscious awareness that can solve these problems -- the part of the psyche -- you regard as wrong. To solve these viruses, wars, and disasters, the core issue must return to the level of the psyche. Responding to violence with violence always brings more violence and war, not peace. Why, when we clearly could have higher wisdom to solve these problems, do we regard exploration of that part as wrong and unsafe? In real life we frantically hype up war threats, thinking about how to solve problems, you bomb me, I bomb you, countless deductions and drills, and consider all of that right, while considering the thoughts and explorations that would actually solve these problems wrong. How ridiculous this is.

Seth says the point is not to eliminate normal consciousness. He says:

The point is not to eliminate normal consciousness, but really to use its gifts to perceive and utilize other levels of reality, to bring them into the focus of the present, and quite genuinely expand it.

I am not telling you to use dream consciousness to completely overturn your present waking consciousness, and from then on take dreams as reality and live in a dreamlike way. That is not my idea. I am not telling you to eliminate your waking consciousness; I am only telling you to expand it, quite genuinely expand it, rather than limiting yourself to thinking that you have only this one level of consciousness that you can use and think with. You have higher levels, higher angles, wiser methods, but you have not seen them. Seth says to let you see them, to expand them, not to completely replace your existing consciousness.

In this book, from beginning to end, I will suggest many kinds of exercises. Some of these exercises require variations of normal thinking, that is, those consciousnesses outside normal consciousness that you ordinarily have not understood, felt, or used. I may ask you to forget bodily stimuli, normal sensory stimuli, but the purpose is to expand them, not shut them down. Remember, Seth never said your mode of consciousness is wrong. It is not wrong; it is just too single, used too much at only one level, and has shut out all the others. The limitations of your present mode of consciousness are not innate; rather, they are caused by your beliefs and practices limiting it. You have taken it too far and can no longer find the other natural levels of your consciousness.

Then there is the fourth exercise. One night, when you are about to fall asleep, at the moment just before you are asleep but not yet asleep, try to tell yourself: when you fall asleep in a little while, you will pretend to be awake. Tell yourself, soon I will fall asleep, but I am pretending to be awake. Suggest to yourself that you will not immediately sink into sleep, but instead will enter another kind of waking state. Try to imagine that you are awake while you are asleep; suggest to yourself that while sleeping you are actually awake, or pretend to be sleeping while actually you are awake. In other words, tell yourself that in the dream you are awake.

Fifth exercise: when you go to bed, lie down comfortably and relax. Just as you are about to fall asleep, suddenly imagine that you are waking up the next morning, and suggest to yourself, "I am waking up." Imagine the scene of the next morning -- at six or five thirty in the morning, before dawn, you wake up. Seth says, I will not tell you to consciously find or feel anything at this time; the important thing is to carry out these exercises, and practice them yourself. Do not be purposeful; do not think about what you want to get. Just do the exercise.

He says that, as mentioned earlier, there are different kinds of knowledge, and these exercises will bring you into contact with this kind of knowledge in another way.

These exercises will bring you into contact with this kind of knowledge in another way.

This kind of knowledge, like Seth's worldview, is different from the knowledge of the three-dimensional world. These exercises may allow you to touch this kind of knowledge. After doing them for a while, they will open alternate modes of perception, blur the boundary between sleep and waking, and mix the different states of consciousness of waking and sleeping. When you are awake, you analyze according to time, sequence, logic, and reason; when asleep, you can completely disrupt these limits and let emotion, importance, and the nature of events organize and summarize the occurrence of events. This is the alternate mode of perception. You will have one more viewpoint, unlike when awake you have only one viewpoint. Experience itself will change its nature, because the way of organization is different and the way of experiencing is different; the nature of the experience obtained will change.

Sixth exercise: sometimes when you are awake, at a convenient and safe moment, imagine that the experience before your eyes at this moment is a dream, and a very symbolic dream at that, and then try to interpret it. It must be at a safe time; do not drive or do dangerous things. Sitting at home or in a risk-free place, look at everything before you and tell yourself: all of this before me is a dream; I am in a dream right now, except this dream is so clear and so real. Everyone who studies spirituality or the Seth material, after doing this for a while, has already begun to have those ultra-clear dreams. Previous dreams may have been blurry, but now the dreams are exceptionally clear. Now you are having such a dream: beyond that door is waking, and on this side of the door you are dreaming. Then analyze: since I am dreaming now, everything happening before me is something happening in the dream, so let me interpret my own dream for myself, asking why these things before me are appearing, what hints and symbolic meanings they give me, and what connections lie behind them. Look at who the people around you are, what they represent, what meanings they have, and where the significance of their appearance lies. If this experience is a dream, what does this dream mean? You are now Duke of Zhou, interpreting your own dream, reading your daytime life as a dream. In the morning, what kind of waking life will you rise into? If the life before you is a dream, what kind of life will you enter after waking from the dream? Think about this question.

The nature of consciousness cannot be clarified.

These exercises will bring you into contact with another kind of knowing and familiarize you with the different feelings of unfamiliar consciousness. What was previously unfamiliar to you will now slowly become familiar -- the different feelings of consciousness. After doing the exercises, your consciousness itself will have a completely different feeling. Some questions you might ask yourself may be answered in this state. But they may not necessarily be answered in the way you expect, and you may not necessarily be able to transfer the answer into the terms you already know. He gives you the answer; you understand it in your mind, but you cannot say it. Seth says these unfamiliar patterns of consciousness are very natural in the dream state and are experienced every day, but you are simply not familiar with them.

These patterns of consciousness exist beneath your perception, beneath your conscious awareness, making alternative choices. In other words, they are arranging your life and making choices for your future life, and you are unaware of it. Now let yourself feel how these patterns of consciousness operate, and you will have a general idea of how your future life is arranged.

Seventh exercise: when you walk along a street or somewhere else, pretend that you are in the air, flying an airplane, looking down from above at the same street and the same scenery, including yourself walking on the street. On another occasion, for example when you are sitting at home, imagine that you are outside on the grass or on the street, looking at yourself from outside. All these exercises should then return to the present situation: focus your attention outward as clearly as possible in the present moment, letting actual sounds and sights enter your attention. That is to say, shift the focus of consciousness to the person flying the airplane or outside the house, so that he can also hear sounds and see images. That person is also you.

The results of these exercises will give you a clearer picture of the world, because they help the operation of your perceptual ability, enhance your perception, and let you perceive things that previously escaped your attention, such as subtle differences in actual conditions. This is like the movie I once recommended (I forgot what it was called), where you instantly enter this hypersensitive state of perception, with an extraordinary perception of the surrounding environment, able to feel any subtle change or difference.

We will be dealing with actual, direct experience.

After practicing, you are dealing with actual direct experience, directly feeling the environment, rather than through belief systems and the perceptual methods of the three-dimensional world. If you only intellectually realize what I am talking about but actually know nothing, then it will do you no good. You cannot remain only at the level of theory and talk glibly. These exercises are important because they will provide evidence of your greater perceptual abilities and prove that you have innate talents and abilities. You continue to rely on the known information channels, but at the same time explore those information channels that have not been recognized but can indeed be obtained.

Eighth exercise: foreseeing the future. In the beginning, do not worry about whether your predictions are true or can come true, for in this way you will extend consciousness into areas not ordinarily used. Do not put any stake in the prediction; otherwise, if it does not come true, you will be very disappointed and end the whole program. Try your predictive ability. Predict something that definitely has no relation to your personal interests; it cannot be the next lottery number, and do not make it related to your life. Predict something unrelated to yourself. It can be anything, such as whether it will rain tomorrow. Boldly predict it, write it down, then see whether the actual result is the same as your prediction. This exercise can be done at any time. If you continue, you will indeed find that you perceive certain future things and can truly foresee certain future events. This knowledge cannot be obtained through ordinary means.

A group member told me the same kind of thing this morning. He said: "Yesterday I had a feeling that you should post a new video, which should be Chapter 15 and Chapter 16 of The Magical Approach, and I could also see that you had posted it, and that the two were posted together. But when I went to look for the video, I found that it was not there; there were still Chapter 14 and Week 6 of The Master Key System, and there was no combined post of Chapter 15 and Chapter 16 of The Magical Approach. But after a day passed, I saw you post it. Yet yesterday I clearly and plainly saw that you had already posted it, and at that time I knew you had posted them together." This really is abnormal, because The Magical Approach had never had two chapters posted together before, and even in the Seth material two chapters are rarely put together. But at the time Chapter 16 of The Magical Approach was very short, only a few sentences, so it could only be combined with Chapter 15, and he was able to foresee this long before. This kind of thing happens a great deal among group members.

If you continue, you will find that you do very well in some areas and frequently miss in others. You will find that certain patterns of association successfully lead to correct hunches. This process is very much concerned with emotion. You will perceive certain information that is important to you; importance, like a magnet, draws the material to you. In other words, you predict accurately on questions you are interested in, provided there is no personal stake involved; on matters you have no feeling about, you basically do not predict accurately, only a 50/50 probability¹¹. Because your emotion, your feeling about the importance of the matter, just as at this moment, draws that event to you. In daily life, we attract experience in the same way. What you think is precognition is actually just you drawing events in.

Before the events you anticipate happen, you are already aware of them, whether or not you have successfully predicted them consciously. Whether you predict them or not, you will draw them to you according to the intensity of emotion, and then what you anticipate will happen, because you already know it will happen before it occurs. You form your life through the close interaction of your conscious purposes and beliefs. Although your future can occasionally be correctly perceived in advance by a gifted psychic, the future is too plastic to be boxed into any kind of systematic framework, and free will is always involved. Fortune-telling perceives future scenes and pictures through psychic ability, because you have already imagined them happening at the conscious level. But do not be misled; the future is always plastic and cannot be framed into a fixed system. Your subjective initiative and free will are always involved.

The variability of consciousness provides a far greater freedom.

That possible event exists within the plasticity of consciousness. Consciousness is flexible and has free will, and this broader freedom transcends the probability of that event happening. The decision is in your hands. In fact, such dreams can actually be used to avoid that probability. Many people have had this experience: before a plane crash, they suddenly cancel and do not take that flight, unconsciously avoiding it. Only after you understand the freedom of such regions do you allow yourself to explore altered states of consciousness or the world of dreams. When you understand that the future is entirely in your hands, rather than being rigidly limited by precognition, do you dare to truly explore the different states of consciousness. If you still hold a fatalistic view, entering such a state is worse than not entering it at all, thinking every day about terrible things happening on some future day, living in constant fear. So when your level has not yet reached that point, do not enter; only when you realize that the future can be changed and that the degree of freedom is entirely under your own control can you safely use another state of consciousness.

Seth says:

Such exercises should not be used to replace the world that you now know, but to supplement it, to complete it, and to allow you to perceive its true world, its true dimensions, its true dimensionality.

The exercises are not meant for you to replace the existing world, but to supplement and complete it. Do not get this backwards. There is no need to separate the waking state and the dream state in a particular way, because they are complementary, not opposite. Many aspects of the normal dimension in which you live depend upon dream experience. Your familiarity with the world of symbols comes directly from the dreaming self. Symbols in dreams have meaning in reality, but the process of becoming familiar with them needs to be completed in dreams, because the three-dimensional world will not give you those symbols and hints. If you are not familiar with them, you cannot read the meaning of the symbols, so you need to become familiar with those symbols often in dreams in order for them to be helpful in waking life. Do not deliberately set dreams and waking in opposition.

Language itself is based upon dreams.

Long before language was born, man dreamed that he was speaking. Man dreamed of himself flying, and the impetus of that dream of flying led to the invention of the airplane, making mechanical flight possible. This is not a symbolic description, but a very real statement. That is how we invented the airplane: humanity first had the dream of flying like a bird, and it was under the impetus of this dream that the airplane was invented.

From the very beginning I have said that the self is not limited by the body.

This means that consciousness has other ways of perceiving information, and can obtain information through things outside the body, without needing to rely solely on the body's outer senses: eyes, nose, ears. Even in the three-dimensional world, experience is not limited by the ordinary modes of perception. An event does not have only one way of being experienced; change the way of experiencing it, and the nature of the event changes. However, unless you allow yourself enough freedom to experiment with other modes of perception, this remains only a fine theory, not practical experience.

This session ends here, and Chapter Three also ends here. This chapter is very long, so I will not say much more at the end. I hope that everyone, according to your own schedule and interests after class, will do these eight exercises in an organized and systematic way. Some exercises need to be done continuously, often, and repeatedly, in order to become familiar with another state of your own consciousness, and to become familiar with different angles and methods of perceiving things, rather than obtaining information only through the single channel of the outer senses.

注释与核实

1. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "William James" (https://www.britannica.com/biography/William-James) ↩

2. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Srinivasa Ramanujan | Mathematician, Biography, Contributions, & Facts" (https://www.britannica.com/biography/Srinivasa-Ramanujan) ↩

3. This claim could not be verified. ↩

4. Source: Grand Forks Herald, "America 250: 50 years ago today - January 5, 1976" (https://www.grandforksherald.com/america-250-50-years-ago-today-january-5-1976) ↩

5. Source: Wikipedia, "Flower Sermon" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flower_Sermon) ↩

6. This claim could not be verified. ↩

7. Source: Wikipedia, "The Master Key System" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_Key_System) ↩

8. Source: Wikipedia, "The Master Key System" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Master_Key_System) ↩

9. This claim could not be verified. ↩

10. Source: Wikipedia, "Tsai Chin" (https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E8%94%A1%E7%90%B4) ↩

11. This claim could not be verified. ↩