Mike's commentary · Seth Speaks, Chapter 11

The "Introduction" and "Key Points" of 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

Chapter Eleven discusses choices after death and the mechanisms of transition. After death there are mainly three choices: reincarnation, reorganizing past-life experience, and entering the system of probabilities. The middle plane is a time of rest, reunion, and choosing, and personal beliefs can speed up or delay the choice. Reincarnation is not linear progress; the soul may develop lopsidedly in certain areas or in a balanced way according to its needs. After death there are also directions such as teacher, creator, and healer; there is no special punishment for suicides, but the lessons not yet faced still need to be faced. It emphasizes that beliefs create reality, and concepts such as the opposition of good and evil, heaven and hell, are major obstacles.

Key Points of This Chapter

• After death there are mainly three choices: reincarnation, reorganizing past-life experience, and entering the system of probabilities.
• The middle plane is a time of rest, reunion, and choice; personal beliefs can speed up or delay the choice.
• Reincarnation is not linear progress; the soul may develop lopsidedly in certain areas or develop in a balanced way according to its needs.
• Those who commit suicide receive no specific punishment, but the lessons not yet faced must still be faced in another life.
• After death there are also directions such as teacher, creator, and healer; erroneous beliefs such as the opposition of good and evil, heaven and hell, are the main obstacles.

Main Text

After Death, You Have Three Choices

The previous two chapters were devoted to introducing the process after a person dies. Many people will ask, why spend so much time introducing what happens after death? We still have so many things about life that we haven't had time to discuss, such as emotions, feelings, career, life, and the difficulties we encounter in the human world. Why spend so many pages talking about what happens after death?

Actually, the reasoning is very simple: because it is in the process after death that you can come to appreciate the meaning and importance of life, and understand why we come to live. This also introduces the idea that there is no strict boundary between life and death. In this lifetime of ours, there are countless small deaths, experienced every day. The state of death is not unfamiliar to you, and the experiences after death are also introduced in a very vivid way.

Starting from Chapter 11, he mainly talks about the several choices that ordinary people have after death, as well as the characteristics of each choice and the things they will experience. What he says is:

After death, an infinite variety of different experiences are open to you.

Here "infinite" is crucial: the experiences you can choose after death are infinite, and all of them are possible, completely open to you. You can choose, and the choice is determined according to your own situation. But there is a "but" here that is very important -- it must be according to your development, determined according to your consciousness and your degree of development. The "you" here does not refer to the you of the three-dimensional world; it refers to the you of this personality fragment, or this one you of the soul.

But it must be according to your development.

Some experiences are more probable than others. The key point to note is the phrase "more probable" -- there are distinctions among experiences. If understood from the perspective of a person in the three-dimensional world, there is indeed a distinction between higher and lower; but in essence, higher and lower are relative terms, and it is not said that one kind of experience is absolutely higher in some place. Generally speaking, after death there are three main ranges of choice, but there are also exceptions and special cases; it is not absolute.

The first kind: You may decide to be reincarnated once more. This is the choice of most of those who are likely to do so.

The second kind: You may choose not to reincarnate, but instead focus your attention on your previous life, taking all the new experiential material of your previous life and using it as new experiential material. As described in the previous chapter, you will experience the events of your last life over again, but this experience is not exactly the same; you can change the decisions within it.

In other words, in the previous life there were many possible choices. For example, you could choose whether to go to work or continue your studies after university, whether to study abroad or stay in your own country to develop -- these are all very major life choices. But in your previous life you only experienced one choice: if you chose to study abroad, you could not stay at home to develop; if you chose to continue your studies, you could not go to work. What is being told to you now is that you can take your previous life and choose again: pick one that you did not choose at the time, or one that you felt you chose wrong, or a place that could be improved, and choose it again.

At this time you do not need to be reincarnated again, and you do not need to take on a physical body again. You are in this in-between zone, and through the material, events, and storylines of your previous life, you rehearse them over and over, and from this you can also learn a great deal. Within this there are all kinds of variations, and you can make corrections according to your choices.

The third kind: You may enter completely into a probable system, which is very different from reincarnation. At this time you will transcend all ideas of temporal sequence.

What is a probable system? This is somewhat difficult to explain in words, because he does not provide much further explanation here either. Let me try to explain it briefly and reluctantly: a probable system is somewhat like entering the time of another parallel universe. The system you enter contains a bunch of parallel universes, where every possibility and every choice exists simultaneously, and you experience all the possibilities at the same time. Therefore, within this, time absolutely has no sense of continuity whatsoever. Only then can you truly experience what is meant by the simultaneous existence of time.

After you reincarnate into the human world, time becomes continuous again, and you cannot experience this simultaneity. In the in-between zone after death you can feel part of it -- you can pass through time and overcome time, but it still does not mean that you can experience many things simultaneously. For you, time has already become meaningless, but for the you in the in-between zone there is still a kind of time: what you experience is psychological time, or spiritual time, not physical time. There is still a feeling of time, only felt in a different form. But once you enter the probable system, you have no sense of the continuity of time at all -- there is no before, no after, no sequential relationship of before and after.

Those who have studied Seth know that in his framework system, Seth divides things into Framework 1 and Framework 2 (of course there is also Framework 3; let us not talk about Framework 3 for now, let us first talk about Framework 2). Framework 1 is this three-dimensional world in which we live. Framework 2 is all the possibilities within this three-dimensional world. For example, you knock a cup from the table onto the floor; in the three-dimensional world it shatters. But in the higher probability, you never knocked the cup at all, the cup did not fall to the floor, and it certainly did not shatter. So the possibility that it did not shatter also exists.

Within Framework 2, the possibility that you knocked the cup and it shattered, and the possibility that you did not knock the cup and it did not shatter, both exist simultaneously, and of course there are many other possibilities as well. All these possibilities exist in Framework 2, but they have not been actualized. It is like the state before wave function collapse in quantum mechanics¹ -- before the wave function collapses, you cannot determine what state it actually is; only when an observer appears does one state become actualized.

It is the same in the three-dimensional world: only after your consciousness makes a choice -- what state you want, what state you have chosen -- does it become actualized. But this "state you want" is not chosen by the conscious you; it must be that unconscious you -- the you that you have not yet become aware of -- that makes the choice behind the scenes, and you cannot feel it. If you have watched my videos about the space of thought, you will know whether human beings actually have subjective consciousness or free will; the reasoning is the same. You think it is you who is choosing, but in fact it is the higher inner self behind you, or that higher level of consciousness, that is making the choice. From the countless possibilities in Framework 2, it chooses what it wants to actualize in the present moment, and so you see that thing, and that event becomes real, actualized time in the three-dimensional world.

And as for those things in Framework 2 that did not happen, are they happening? They are still happening -- every branch is happening simultaneously in parallel. For example, after you are born, when you go to kindergarten, there are three you could choose from, and you chose one of them; after kindergarten you go to elementary school, and there may be two you could choose from, and you went to one of them; after elementary school, depending on whether you did well on exams, there are again many middle schools to choose from... This whole series of choices all exists simultaneously within Framework 2; millions upon millions of possibilities are all in there.

A probable system is exactly this kind of system: nothing has been actualized, nothing has been separated, everything exists simultaneously. If someone chooses to enter this kind of probable system for reincarnation, then relatively speaking it is somewhat more advanced -- there is no need to be reincarnated into a physical body again, and no need to take the limited experiences of a previous life and arrange them in different combinations according to a linear sequence.

The second method is like a decision tree: at different nodes, you choose whether to go left or go right. This time choose left and see what the result is; next time choose right, and experience each choice one by one. The third method is even more powerful: you do not first finish experiencing going left and then finish experiencing going right, and then experience every choice at every node in the middle in sequence; instead, you experience all possibilities simultaneously -- you experience all of them at the same time. You can experience both the result of going left and the result of going right; beneath the two large branches there are countless small branches, and beneath the small branches there are countless even smaller branches, like a great tree with luxuriant foliage. At this time you simultaneously experience the existence of the trunk, the existence of the large branches, the existence of the small branches, the leaves, and the veins on the leaves. This has already gone beyond the limits of human understanding -- it is enough if you can understand this; this is the third kind.

What Kind of Person Chooses What Kind of Path

Let us continue with what he says:

Some people prefer a life organization that encloses past, present, and future within a logical structure.

These people like to arrange past, present, and future according to a certain chronological order, logical structure, script, and storyline, weaving them into a script to experience. They prefer a single-threaded approach, and usually they will reincarnate. Another type of person is naturally inclined to experience in an unusual, intuitive way. Our usual way is rational, logical thinking; making decisions requires analyzing pros and cons. But this type of person experiences events through intuition, without needing rationality, without needing logic. Their way of organizing events is not single-threaded time; events come in blocks, in groups, overlapping and mixed together:

Organization is provided by the process of association.

Association means: when you think of one thing, you immediately think of the next thing, which by the standards of the three-dimensional world has no logic. Like dreaming, where nothing seems connected to anything else, yet through your own mind you can associate things together and then experience them. There is no need for the framework of time to organize them. The first type of person needs the framework of time and plot -- time must have a before and after, there must be logic, and there must be a storyline; this type does not need that, intuitive association is enough. Such a person can place themselves within a system of probabilities and make it the main goal of their efforts.

Some people simply find that they do not like the physical system, purely do not like it, and so they detach from it. But here we must remember the word "however":

However, they must wait until the chosen cycle of reincarnations has been completed before they can leave physical reality.

This passage is very crucial. Many people have been asking: Buddhism says how to escape the sea of suffering, how to escape the six realms of reincarnation, what state, what ability is required to escape. Here he is also addressing this question, but he does not expand on it, just mentions it in passing, though he gives us many clues. When can one leave?

Those who, through reincarnation, have fully developed their abilities within that system.

"Through reincarnation" -- one must have gone through reincarnation; "within that system" -- already within this Earth system; "fully developed their abilities" -- this is the key point to underline. In other words, we must fully develop all our talents within the Earth system, fully develop all our potential.

But here we must remember one point: developing abilities is not about comparing with others, not about comparing with other souls or fragment personalities, only about comparing with yourself. The degree to which your abilities have developed depends on what potentials you possess -- your soul's attributes contain this many potentials, and whether you have brought each one into play. Someone else is at piano level ten, and you say I also want to be piano level ten -- there is no need. It does not even matter if you cannot play the piano at all; that is another soul's attribute, and your soul does not need that kind of potential. Every soul is completely different.

Never compare yourself with others while alive, and then still compare yourself with others after death -- that is an extremely foolish approach. You do not need to compare yourself with others while alive, and even less so after death. Just be yourself, bring out all your own abilities and potentials, and compare yourself only with yourself.

Some people, after finishing reincarnation, may still choose to enter the cycle again. They have already completed their learning, already graduated, but they still come back -- as teachers. For example, the bodhisattvas in Buddhism: a bodhisattva has already reached the state of a Buddha; in terms of ability, state, and enlightenment, they are exactly the same as a Buddha. But why are they still bodhisattvas? Because they want to come back to deliver all sentient beings; they hold this belief. They want every person and every thing in the world to understand the truth, to understand the principles, and this is the main purpose of their return. So they reincarnate again and again to deliver all sentient beings. A Buddha is another kind of state -- they no longer wish to return, and have gone on to pursue a higher state.

From Seth's perspective, these people come back as teachers, to enlighten everyone, to wake everyone up. What principles do they teach? What they teach is the same as what Seth teaches: each of you is inherently complete, each of you has divinity, just as the Buddha said, everyone can become a Buddha on the spot. You yourself are already a Buddha, only you do not know you are a Buddha, nor do you believe you are a Buddha, nor do you believe that you are a part of All That Is, nor do you believe that you are a part of the Creator -- you absolutely dare not believe this. So you live a muddled, befuddled life. What do these teachers, wise ones, and enlightened ones come back to do? They come back to wake you up. Once you are awakened, you understand everything.

In Sanskrit, the word Buddha means "the awakened one"; Buddha means the awakened one -- the person who has awakened, the person who has figured things out. The Buddha said everyone is a Buddha, meaning everyone is an awakened person. If you awaken, you are a Buddha; if you have not awakened, you are still an ordinary person. It is like being woken up by someone else, and then you become a Buddha. Bodhisattvas are people who return to the world to keep waking others up.

These people always have some awareness of their own greater identity. The greater identity is the entity, at the level of the soul. They are somewhat different from ordinary people, able to recognize a part of their own identity. There is also another type of person who is rather indecisive, lingering in this in-between zone, having not yet figured out where to go. The first three choices can be assumed to have distinctions of higher and lower, but in fact there are none -- you must not hold such a notion.

The Middle Plane: Resting Area, Meeting Place

The place where this indecisive person stays is called the middle plane. Relatively speaking, it can be regarded as a resting zone. It is like when you take a plane from here to there, and you have not yet decided whether the next leg will be by plane, or by train, or whether you will simply settle down and live in this city — when you have not decided, you rest in the airport lounge. From these zones — this airport lounge — messages from relatives most often come through. The information you receive from departed loved ones basically all comes from this place. The level that living people visit during dream projection is also often this plane. The dimension or level we often want to project into when dreaming is frequently this middle zone — a transfer station, a resting area.

However, before the time of choosing, there is still a period of self-examination. This self-examination is not a review of the last life — how to review the previous life was already discussed in the last chapter. What is spoken of here is:

Your examination of your entire "history" — a kind of self-examination and understanding of your entity.

He put "history" in quotation marks, because it has no before and after, so it is not called history, but if you understand it with human thought, you treat it as your history: all the personality reincarnations of all your lives, you can know and understand them all. And you know what the essence of the entity is, and what the essence of the soul is.

The entity has many fragment personalities projected out to reincarnate, and other parts of the entity that are more advanced than you will give you counsel. During this process of self-examination, they will help you and advise you: how you should view these matters, how to view the problems, help you understand what the essence of the entity is, and tell you why you undertook such a reincarnation, and what the meaning of that reincarnation was for the growth of your entire soul.

For example, you become aware of your other reincarnational selves. During this process of self-examination, you can discover your other reincarnational selves, and you will also have emotional connections with people you have known across lives. Some relationships may replace the relationships in your most recent past life. What does this mean? You now think that your relationships with people in this life are extremely close — this is the person you love most, this is your father, this is your mother, this is your child, things you cannot let go of. But when you reach this stage, you will discover that across all your lives there are people who are more important to you than those in your previous life, and you did not know it. At that time you will know, and you will make new choices, discovering that their relationship with you is the truly closer one, not the closest relationship you thought you had in your previous life.

This period of self-examination is also the meeting place for those who come from your own system. Our own system is the earth, the physical world. You and the people from all your lives — those with emotional connections, those you have encountered, those you have come into contact with — all have a meeting point, and it is during this process of self-examination that you can meet together.

For those who have lost their way, at this time you will be confused, not knowing what is going on. He says:

All necessary explanations are given.

All that is necessary — whatever questions you cannot figure out, about your life, about the value of your soul, about your reincarnations, all can be explained to you here, and you will understand everything. Why you are like this, why you are like that. Many people say that cause and effect is right here, and he will let you see or experience the relationships involved. But you must remember, this is not the kind of cause and effect you understand.

The three-dimensional world has its own laws of development, because the three-dimensional world has time, has space, and has physical laws and natural laws. Is there cause and effect in the three-dimensional world? Yes, because where there is time there is cause and effect — where there is before there is after. Physical law is that when you drop something from a height it will certainly fall to the ground; it cannot fly up into the sky. Simply put, cause and effect means conforming to the laws of the three-dimensional world. The laws of the three-dimensional world have two basic assumptions: there is time, there is space, and then there are the physical and growth mechanisms of the earth. For example, if you bury a seed in the soil it will grow. Why does it grow? You do not need to understand why; it is simply the law of the three-dimensional world. The choices you make in the three-dimensional world will inevitably produce results in the three-dimensional world, and these results manifest in the three-dimensional world.

But when you reach a higher dimension, when you reach this process of choosing, when you reach this period of time, they explain all these reasons to you. What is most important to remember here is that these are explanations on the soul level, not explanations in your three-dimensional world. Why was I poor in this life? Why did I meet him in this life? Why do the two of us still have this karmic entanglement that has not ended? Why could the person I love not be with me in this life? — These are all three-dimensional explanations, three-dimensional confusions, three-dimensional questions one wants to ask. But what he speaks of here is almost entirely from the soul level: why you need to learn on the soul level, what you need to grow, what you need to experience.

In four-dimensional space there is no cause and effect of the three-dimensional world. You love him and he loves you, and then you come together naturally — not because of any previous relationship, it has nothing to do with that, but because on the soul level you need to experience different emotions, different creations, and different completions. Not because of those reasons in your three-dimensional world.

So on the four-dimensional level there is no such cause and effect. In other words, when you reincarnate, you will not necessarily be born into the timeline after your death; you may be born into a timeline before your death. What you experienced was a previous life, for example from 1982 to 2075. If we go by cause and effect, you would certainly be born after that. But after this review of the previous life and the explanations from others, you may be born into the year 1924 or 1977 to reincarnate. From the perspective of cause and effect this is completely incomprehensible — how could you go back before? So cause and effect itself does not hold up.

But why such a choice is made, there must be a reason on the soul level. It needs to experience what you experienced in that previous life — whether experiences, creations, or events — what you learned from them, and where you feel you still need to improve or learn. In this process, the reasons are entirely based on the demands of the soul, not the reasons of the three-dimensional world. When you understand these things, the confusion will be resolved, and you will understand what you truly want to do.

Energy After Death and "Ghosts"

And those who do not know they are dead will be told their true situation here -- this part was already covered in the previous two chapters. Some people do not know they are dead, and at this point they will be told that they are dead, and may be helped to recover their energy and spirit.

Why help them recover energy and spirit? The essence of the soul does not need physical time to exist. It can get what it thinks of instantly, and the moment its intention moves, it is already there, completely free of the physical body. But when it comes to the three-dimensional world, it has no choice -- it must borrow a physical body to operate. Borrowing this physical body requires a portion of energy and a great deal of patience to drive this body to walk, to take trains, to use transportation -- originally it could push itself to another place in an instant, but it must use this physical body, so it needs energy. If it does not need to move the body, then it hardly needs much energy at all.

This is a bit like the movie Avatar²: a person borrows a body created from local genes on the Avatar planet, and after pouring consciousness into it, has to learn how to use this body. Our children are the same -- babbling and learning to speak, toddling and learning to walk, bit by bit learning to operate this physical body. But the physical body is far too clumsy for the soul.

Let me make an analogy: suppose you have a suit of armor that lets you fly when you put it on, and you can fly anywhere in the world. Then someone tells you that you must throw this armor away, you cannot use it, and wherever you go you have to walk, and on top of that you have to drag an especially heavy piece of luggage behind you. Would you not need more energy then? More than flying in the armor.

When a person has died and still does not believe they are dead, staying near the body or the corpse, still wanting to return to the three-dimensional world, not wanting to reincarnate, they will expend a great deal of energy. Because they try again and again to drive that corpse which can no longer be driven -- the physical body is already dead, it cannot be driven, yet you try again and again to get it up, to revive it, and this process consumes a great deal of energy. So in this zone there is a process of replenishing energy, replenishing the spirit, so that you come to understand again that you are dead -- do not spend any more time or energy on the physical body, and certainly do not waste energy on it. Just go.

This is also a time of study and understanding. From this zone, those who are abnormal have dreams of returning to the physical environment. Who are the abnormal ones? They are ghosts. The previous chapter explained that ghosts are those who, in this state, often go back. Like the rich man with obsessive-compulsive disorder who washed his hands, that ghost has an obsessive compulsion to return to a certain physical time, having the same dream every day, dreaming of returning to the physical time, seeing loved ones again, seeing the things he is attached to again. To people living in the three-dimensional world, this ghost that comes back again and again is a ghost. This matter happens in this zone -- he is dead, but does not know he is dead, and then he must be enlightened and guided, told that he is already dead, that he should no longer cling to the life of his previous incarnation, and should begin a new life.

But some people simply cannot accept reality. They have a favorite thing, a favorite person, a favorite activity, and they have not had enough of it yet, they cannot bear to part with it, they cannot let go, and they keep going back. You tell them the physical body is already dead and they must look forward, and they say, no, I just cannot bear to leave him, I keep thinking of him, all my thoughts, experiences, and emotions are on him, I cannot leave, I have to go back and see how he is doing. No matter what you say, it is useless -- such people are, to us, like ghosts.

The Meeting Place Between Systems

This state can be said to be a meeting place between systems. If "system" is hard to understand, you can think of it as a country: different countries have different political systems, economic systems, languages, cultures, currencies, value systems, and social structures. Some behaviors are legal in certain countries and illegal in others; some things are morally condemned in these countries, while in other countries they are perfectly fine. Take abortion, for example -- in some places it is illegal and prohibited, while in other countries it has already been opened up. In the United States, decades ago or a hundred years ago, abortion was illegal³, and even now many states consider it bad, mainly due to Christian influence -- because they feel that it is a life, and killing a life is illegal. Every country is different.

Imagine each country as a different system. You are now at the airport, and you can decide at any time which country you want to go to. Want to go to the most primitive tribes in Africa? Buy a plane ticket to some tribe in Uganda. Want to enjoy the extremely luxurious life of an Arab country? Fly to Arabia -- you can marry many wives, have a lot of money, and legally marry many wives. Want to experience the tide and wave of revolution? Fly to North Korea, enter Pyongyang, and it is a completely different state of life. You can also experience the different cultures of Europe or America, or go to Antarctica or anywhere else.

Different systems, different dimensions, different levels, can be imagined as different locations on Earth -- the rules, institutions, laws, cultures, morals, languages, and money are all different. Of course, the differences between countries are not that great, but you can magnify these differences infinitely, magnifying them into different levels and different spaces. And you, at this very moment of decision, can go wherever you want. What you go there to do, that is the question you have to decide. This is the place where multiple systems meet.

The Decision at the Airport Matters More Than Where You Go

But this last point is very important, he says:

A person's situation and development here matters more than the length of the stay.

This is a transitional step, but an important one.

You have been here in your dreams.

What does this mean? The length of time you spend at the airport does not matter. You might stay five minutes and decide to go to Germany, someone else decides to go to Spain, someone else to Chile -- how long it takes to make the decision is not important. What matters is what you learn in the middle of it: what you have grasped from the previous leg of the journey, what you have gained, and then deciding where to go for the next leg.

Why is this step so crucial? Because among the choices in your life, where you choose to go determines a great deal of what follows. This transitional zone after death, this transitional period, is very important; it determines where you will go afterward. Never think that after death you just casually pick a reincarnation and get reborn, as if playing a game -- you absolutely must not understand it that way. It is far more important and far more complex than that. Once you finish this session, you will understand why it is necessary to study what comes after death and to understand the life after death, and what that scene is actually like.

Session 541

Reincarnation Is Far More Complex Than a Simple Decision

Seth then talks about reincarnation. He says:

What is involved in reincarnation is far more complex than the simple decision to undergo one physical existence.

That is to say, reincarnation is far more complex than what we imagine -- after death you arrive in another space or dimension, make a decision saying "I want to reincarnate," then set up some conditions or a script for the reincarnation, and just like that you reincarnate. It is not such a simple matter.

Therefore, during that portion of the in-between period I am discussing, many issues are considered. This in-between period is very important; you have many issues to consider.

He says that when most people think of reincarnation, they think of it as a single-line process. That is, when we ordinarily think of reincarnation, we always imagine a continuous, single-line process -- the soul perfects itself through each successive life. This is our usual way of thinking, and he says this idea is wrong; it is an extreme oversimplification. Why is extreme oversimplification wrong? Because in earlier chapters he said that things which are oversimplified are sometimes wrong. If something is simplified to too severe a degree, that in itself is an error.

Many people think, according to human linear time and single-line consideration -- I die in this life, and the next life should be better than the previous one, because I have reflected and summarized on the basis of the previous life, my experience is increasingly rich, so my next life will certainly be better than the previous one. In this way my soul will become better and better, more and more perfected. He says this is an extremely simplified process; there is no such process of getting better and better -- not that there is none at all, but it is not like that, nor is it a state of reaching perfection.

He says this subject has countless individual variations; everyone is different, completely individualized. Therefore, the process of reincarnation may be used in many ways to achieve a kind of "progress" -- progress should also be in quotation marks. Each person must use reincarnation according to his or her own unique way; within this there is a unique approach.

A "Lopsided" Approach to Reincarnation

Below he gives some examples. This passage is very important; it breaks many people's mistaken ideas and attachments about reincarnation -- humanity always wants to get better and better, to be perfect, to become more and more beautiful, to have a better and better personality, and so on. He says:

Some people choose in a given life to isolate various characteristics and then work almost exclusively on those.

What does it mean to isolate characteristics? It means that some people, in a given life, will build that entire life around one theme and make all kinds of specialized efforts toward it. From the standpoint of the physical world, such a personality looks extremely one-sided, still far from being a well-rounded, balanced person.

How should this be put? It is that this person develops only one particular ability in each life. For example, in this life he develops intelligence to an especially high degree; in that life he develops the emotional aspect to an especially complete degree; in the next life he may become especially accomplished in personal wealth accumulation, in business and enterprise. Each lifetime is like a child's lopsided approach to school subjects -- especially lopsided, with one lifetime cultivating or developing only one particular theme. So such a personality appears one-sided, especially obsessive -- when his intellect is especially developed, his emotional life is a complete mess, and he does not understand emotional matters at all.

It is possible that in one lifetime his IQ is deliberately -- and you must remember this, it is deliberate -- extremely high, and he can exert those mental powers to the best of his ability. The whole personality thoroughly studies these abilities; the uses, advantages, and disadvantages of the intellect are carefully weighed. This same person may, through another lifetime, develop specifically in the emotional area, while deliberately showing very little mental ability.

This is somewhat like playing a game. Anyone who has played role-playing games knows that at the start of the game, you set certain personal attributes for your character, such as strength, intelligence, magical ability, agility, learning ability, and so on. You are given a total of one hundred points, and you can distribute them evenly among five attributes, twenty points each; or you can give intelligence sixty points and give the others ten or eight points each. You can decide the initial bias of this character's personal attributes. After you finish the game the first time, you find you can try a different approach, and next time choose different attributes -- the first time you chose a warrior, the second time you might choose a wizard. Compared with a warrior, a wizard's strength, mobility, movement ability, and ability to withstand attacks are all very poor, but his magical ability is very strong and his learning ability is also very strong. With an example like this, you can understand what he means.

Such a person, as manifested in the human world, may not be a very well-developed, very balanced personality, but rather one with a particular strength in one area and a particular weakness in another. His unique, special creativity may also be specialized in the same way. What is meant by creativity? It is what was discussed earlier: every person is different and has his own exclusive attributes; this is the soul's special creativity, different from other souls. At this time, he also specializes this, making his own characteristics stand out with particular clarity.

Not Linear Progress

If you think of these people's lives as a so-called series of progressions in the ordinary sense, then you will have many questions that cannot be answered.

What this means is, if you treat each reincarnation as a series of progressions -- I develop this ability first, then in the next life I develop that ability, and once an ability is developed I no longer use it and move on to the next one -- if you understand it that way, he says, you will have many questions that cannot be answered, and you will misunderstand it.

Why would you misunderstand it? He will explain later. This is a misconception many people have. Many people think reincarnation is exactly like that, constantly improving in various aspects in turn.

In any case, there is indeed development.

This sentence is very important -- no matter how you put it, there is development, there is indeed development. It is just that in terms of how this development occurs, these people have their preferred choices. Development is certain, because you cannot get worse with each reincarnation; otherwise the meaning of reincarnation would be lost. But this development does not occur in the linear, single-threaded way that we humans understand, and the way it occurs is different for each person. Each person's choice of how this development happens is different.

Some people take a balanced approach to development, with each life being quite balanced; others develop this particular ability in this life. Each person has different preferences.

Learning Through Restraint

By restraining themselves in a certain life, the personality also learns what they did not have.

This sentence is very important. Let us finish reading this passage before explaining it. For example:

The value and purpose of intellectual development.

What does this mean? For instance, when you develop the emotional side in this lifetime, you hold back and restrain the intellect—you allocate very few points to intelligence. Emotionally, you are like a born romantic, especially adept at emotion, especially skilled at emotional expression, communication, and understanding, especially attractive to the opposite sex. But in terms of wisdom and IQ, you are not high enough. Sometimes we also see that some people study very well but are not good-looking, or are lacking in the emotional area; some people are highly developed emotionally and also good-looking, but when it comes to studying they just cannot do it—not that they do not study hard, they genuinely cannot learn it. This is one type of person.

In this type of person, their wisdom and intellect have been suppressed and restrained by themselves. This is one of humanity's blind spots—people think, since my wisdom did not develop this time, is this lifetime only about developing emotion? That is wrong. This is what he said earlier: where are you mistaken? When human beings extremely simplify their understanding of the developmental process, where does the deviation in their understanding lie?

It is that when you do not develop wisdom and suppress it, you can likewise learn the very meaning and value of wisdom itself. In other words, when you lack wisdom, you can actually understand the value and meaning of wisdom better than when you have it. I do not know whether you can understand this. To put it plainly—when you yourself are foolish and not smart enough, only then do you realize how important it is to have a clever mind, and how important wisdom is in human development. Although you do not have it at this time, your understanding of it, your perception of it, and your grasp of its value and purpose are clearer.

You must understand that whether you develop an ability or suppress it, you are actually learning about that ability in both cases. Sometimes when you do not have an ability, you understand its value and purpose even more deeply. If you were born with an IQ of 180, smarter than everyone else, and no one could match you in handling matters, then you would not particularly understand the value and purpose of that high IQ, because you were born with it and do not give it much thought—it is simply something you can do naturally.

Let me give an example, though it may not be quite apt—there is a girl who is very beautiful, and in matters of emotion everything goes smoothly for her; her emotional intelligence is also very high, and she moves through life with ease. At this time another girl who is not good-looking asks her: "Tell me, what abilities do I need to prepare and develop emotionally so that I can be liked by boys the way you are?" But for the beautiful girl, she actually has no special ability, nor does she need one—being beautiful is enough. She receives more attention than girls who are not beautiful, more boys pursue her, she has more emotional experiences, and more opportunities await her. But the opportunities she learns from in the midst of all this are fewer than those of a girl with an ordinary appearance. That ordinary-looking girl, through her own emotional learning and understanding, cultivates herself into a person with a very good character and very good abilities in all respects; in her interactions with the opposite sex she figures out many lessons from experience on her own, and she can understand more deeply what value and meaning emotion actually has in life. She discovers that when two people get along, compatibility and shared values matter more than being beautiful.

This is how, without having an ability, you can actually learn that ability better from another angle. This is something we humans generally do not understand. We often reject the things that are not good—not smart enough, not good-looking enough, not healthy enough—we hope to be good and wealthy, with a good family, beautiful, intelligent, wise, and emotionally intelligent, good in every way. But under the premise of being good in every way, you actually cannot learn very much. On the contrary, those who are lacking in certain respects can learn more in that lifetime of reincarnation.

Many people ask this kind of question: if reincarnation can be chosen, why do we not all choose to be born as trust-fund kids? Father is the richest man in the world, the family has enormous wealth—why not choose that kind of life pattern? Why do so many people still choose to be born into a very ordinary family? If she could choose, she could choose anything. Actually, at this point you can understand that on the level of the soul, what she considers development is different from what you as a human consider development; these values are not the same. Through this you understand why some people obsessively develop one aspect while suppressing another.

So she is learning in both directions. When her IQ is especially strong, she can learn through that strong IQ what roles wisdom can play; when in another lifetime her wisdom is below average, she can also learn the role and value of wisdom. Both directions are learning. Never misunderstand it as: in the lifetime with strong wisdom she only learns about wisdom, and in the lifetime with strong emotion she only learns about emotional things. That is not so. When her emotion is very strong, she is simultaneously learning from the negative example of "not being strong in wisdom," which gives her progress and understanding of value. So whether or not she brings out this ability, she is improving and progressing.

Thus within themselves they generate the desire to possess it.

For example, some people have very high emotional intelligence and can handle everything in the business world relying entirely on EQ—they are extremely good with words, can see into people's hearts, understand people's needs, and handle business with ease and sophistication, but their wisdom is insufficient. At this time she especially wants wisdom—"I am strong in everything; if my IQ were higher, that would be incredible." She does not have this wisdom, and only then does she understand the value and meaning of wisdom in her life. The thing she lacks is precisely the place where she can understand why people need wisdom and why we should develop wisdom.

Therefore, when making choices, people decide the way they will develop in the next life. She will think: my wisdom was insufficient in this life, so should I develop something related to wisdom in the next life? And this was learned through not having wisdom, not through having especially excellent wisdom.

So she can learn from both the positive and the negative side. We humans are the same in society—the things we encounter in life will not always go smoothly; there is good and bad. We must never say we only want the good and do not want the bad. You must learn to study and experience within the bad things; this process is extremely precious. In the bad process you can learn things that cannot be learned in the good process; in smooth sailing you cannot learn those profound truths and life lessons. So when things happen, this is how you should think about them.

A Balanced Approach to Reincarnation

Some individuals will also choose a more relaxed pace and a more balanced way to progress.

Progress certainly exists, but the way of progressing is not what we humans understand as progress. Each person's individuality is very strong. He says:

They will cause all parts of the personality to work together as one.

All the attributes and all the abilities of the personality work together, and they even encounter people they have known in their lives again and again. In each reincarnation they keep meeting, again and again meeting people they knew before. In this way, they can cultivate and develop balanced abilities, their lives will be easier, and their relationships will go more smoothly -- all old friends, old acquaintances, old colleagues, old family members from before, all very familiar to them, so the direction of development is more balanced and more relaxed.

They will solve problems rather gently, in a non-explosive manner.

What does explosive mean? It means in this life my emotional intelligence is especially high but my IQ is not, or the reverse. They do not develop in this extreme way, but rather adjust their steps like dancers. The dancing steps are very graceful and balanced, and the whole body is very coordinated.

Choices in the Middle Ground

During this period of rest and choosing, right in this middle ground, in this process of choosing, you will receive all opinions and counsel.

Remember, all opinions and counsel. Those parts of your personality that are wiser than you, your wise ones, or other teachers and guides, will come and tell you what results each choice will bring -- if you do this, what result will follow; if you do that, what result will follow. Everyone works together to help you set up the experience of your next reincarnation, giving you their advice.

For many reasons, some people do reincarnate before the proper time they were advised to reincarnate. What does this mean? He gives you this counsel and advice, and among it is included what time would be more suitable for you to reincarnate. Because if you reincarnate at that time, you may be able to meet the people you want to meet -- they will also be reincarnating at that time. Or that era, that period, that age may be more suited to your development. Different historical periods, the larger environment, also have a great influence on people.

This is called favorable timing, favorable place, and favorable people. Choose the right timing, choose the right place, and then appear -- this is a relatively good way to reincarnate. What is called good is what fits the setup of your next life. For example, if in your next life you want to develop emotional abilities, but you choose a society that is very repressive toward emotion, then you will have no way to develop emotional abilities, and very easily you will be exiled, expelled, or not accepted by society at a young age. If you live in a very open-minded, very open society with a high acceptance of emotion, then you will have very good opportunities for development.

But this "reincarnating earlier than the previously proper time" does not refer to what we think of as a linear extension of time. For example, a person dies in 2020, and the soul sets it up for him -- or others suggest -- to be born in 2050. But this person cannot wait and is born in 2040. That is our ordinary understanding, and it is one way. But there is another possibility: jumping forward. It was set for him to be born in 1980, but he was born in 1970. So this "earlier" must absolutely not be understood as an earlier point along a linear extension of time, but rather, taking that more suitable time point as the basis, he came earlier than that -- he came when the conditions were not ready, when the timing and place were not quite right, he did not listen to the advice. This kind of person is rather strong-willed, did not listen to others' counsel, and had his own ideas.

This kind of reincarnation, seen in the short term, is very unfortunate, because none of his conditions were ready, the timing and place were not there, and the plan was not well made. When a person's timing and place are not ready, you know how miserable he can be. But in the long run, such a hasty "mistake" can still teach a great lesson.

Remember that "mistake" is in quotation marks. Actually there is no right or wrong; whatever way it is, it is right. Even if it is this kind of so-called mistaken hasty decision as you understand it, he says you can still learn a great lesson.

Let me give a simple example. Suppose we want to travel to a country we have never been to, to go to Ecuador in South America to see wild animals, to see the local indigenous tribes, to see volcanic craters. One way is to prepare everything -- plane tickets, itinerary, local travel agency, driver, hotel, where to go each day, which sights to see, round-trip tickets all booked, executed according to plan, someone to meet you, someone to arrange things, and the journey is very good. The other is the kind of trip where you just go -- completely unprepared, with only a rough idea: "This time let's go to Ecuador in South America and take a look." You know almost nothing about South America, you have only a smattering of knowledge, you have not done much homework, you have not read any road guides, you have not brought any travel guidebooks, and you go without knowing anything. The first stretch of time at the beginning is very chaotic and caught off guard -- the hotel was not booked, and when you arrive you find there is nothing suitable; you do not speak the language, you cannot find a local guide, you do not know where to go to find fun places, and everything in the early stage goes poorly.

But every one of us who has travel experience knows that often in this kind of go-as-you-please, unplanned trip, you will have some unexpected gains and learn more things -- none of which were in your plan. This kind of unexpectedness, this kind of unprepared trip, can let you truly understand the meaning of travel from another level. Each person's choice is different. Some people choose to have a planned trip; some people say, I will just come as I please, I believe in myself, and wherever I go I will travel well. In both cases you will learn a great deal. It is not that you can only learn by following a plan, and that the unplanned way cannot teach you -- in the long run, perhaps he can learn even more. The word "lesson" is not quite the right word; it should be that he learned more things, not that he was taught.

Reincarnation Intervals and Telepathy

There is no timetable.

There is no angel or God who has scheduled you, telling you exactly when, which year, which month, which day, and at what hour to reincarnate. No such timetable exists. It depends entirely on when you yourself want to reincarnate.

It is very unusual for a person to wait longer than three centuries to reincarnate.

This is a side note from him -- you cannot wait more than three hundred years to reincarnate. This is very rare, almost nonexistent. Why? Because it makes it very difficult for him to become familiar with the earth environment and the human environment.

At this point you must be careful not to have the idea of "future" and "past." When he says "more than three centuries," he means more than three centuries of earth time. In other words, you are detached from earth time for more than three centuries. But he does not mean that you must necessarily move forward three hundred years. For example, if it is now 2020, and you do not reincarnate until 2320, you do not necessarily have to reincarnate into 2325, 2375, or 2330 -- not necessarily into this point in time three hundred years later. What I repeatedly emphasize is that you must break the linear-thinking mindset about time in your mind. This is the mindset of us humans. If this mindset is not broken, then when learning many things and understanding many things, it will lead you in a wrong direction, to wrong results and wrong conclusions.

When it is time for you to reincarnate in 2330, you might choose to go back to 1754 to reincarnate, going backward three hundred years. This familiarity or unfamiliarity does not mean that you are unaccustomed to the primitive local way of life several hundred years ago -- at that time there were no electric lights, no light bulbs, let alone cell phones and the internet; nor is it unfamiliarity with future technology three hundred years later, when artificial intelligence runs rampant, robots fill the sky, and people ride personal flying vehicles. It is neither this kind of unfamiliarity with the ancient, nor unfamiliarity with future technology -- none of this is material unfamiliarity. The greatest unfamiliarity is with the whole of human society, with life on this earth.

Three hundred years is a relatively long point in time for a person, and it is also a very long time to stay in the in-between zone. Let me give a simple analogy -- this analogy is not entirely correct, it is only an analogy: if you reincarnate after three hundred years, do you no longer have any acquaintances, any people you know? During these three hundred years you have not reincarnated, and those people you experienced in your previous life may have already reincarnated many times. Furthermore, because you have not lived in the human world for these three hundred years, you have a strong sense of estrangement from the emotions, society, culture, and way of life of the human world. You are like an outsider, an observer, without much participation or identification. You are neither accepted by that society, nor do you have a sense of identity with yourself, and you cannot integrate into that society. Then in that reincarnated lifetime you will not be able to learn very much. He says:

The emotional ties with the earth have already weakened.

Note that what he emphasizes is the emotional ties with the earth, not material ties. In other words, he no longer has much feeling for the earth, no longer has much feeling for the human world. He looks at everything with a faint, indifferent feeling, without a process of wholehearted investment.

For example, after an actor finishes a play and takes a break in his schedule, he will then throw himself into the production of the next television drama or film, into the next role. But if this actor has not acted for fifty years, and after fifty years he is asked to act again, he no longer has much interest in acting itself. He has no great emotional or affective ties to the process of acting, to the acting itself. He has no attachment to the stage either, and he no longer likes it.

He gives a figure of three hundred years. I do not know how he arrived at it; perhaps he obtained it through observation -- very few people exceed three hundred years. So the interval between reincarnations will not be too long. He does not mention it here, but he probably mentions it elsewhere: generally, from a few years to a few decades is normal. Occasionally, a hundred years is also relatively uncommon, two hundred years is even rarer, and three hundred years almost never happens. So it is generally within the time cycle of a few years to a few decades. I am speaking of earth time. Whether the time in the in-between zone is calculated and experienced in terms of earth time, we cannot say. We can only speak in terms of earth time. At that point many people will say: but you also said that time is simultaneous. I say that we are speaking on different levels. From a higher dimension, all these times are happening simultaneously; from a lower dimension, it is different, and he is speaking according to earth time.

Telepathic Appointments

The various relationships of your next life must be settled, and this also involves telepathic communication among the many other people involved.

For example, suppose you want to put on your next play — suppose you are the playwright, the director, and the lead actor all at once, you would certainly choose actors suited to their roles. In your next life you want to find a partner; after you have chosen someone, wouldn't you call him up to discuss it: "I'm telling you about my next play, it's a period piece, I'd like you to play a certain role — do you want to play it, do you have the time, do you have an opening in your schedule, are you willing to share the stage with me, shall the two of us work together and put on something?" In the human world we communicate through phone calls, text messages, WeChat, or other means, but on that level there are none of these — he uses a more advanced method: telepathic communication.

Every sentence of Seth's carries his rigor and an underlying meaning. Why does he emphasize telepathy here? It is not to stress that after death one can only communicate telepathically and there is no other way — that is only the first, literal layer of meaning. The underlying meaning he wants to convey is this: the people you are going to put on the play with are certainly not on the same level as you are right now. It is not that all the actors are waiting there to discuss how to stage the play; very likely this actor was still in his previous play when you went to discuss it with him — perhaps this person is already in another reincarnation, he is alive in the world right now, and you are waiting for him to die and then, in his next cycle, the two of you will partner up and act together. That is possible. You are communicating with him at the underlying level; the conscious you that is alive will not perceive it — you are communicating with the soul at your own underlying level. So that communication is carried out by telepathic means; they are communicating among themselves.

You can make an appointment, and you can wait. This is also very common in real life — in order to wait for a certain actor, you have to wait for his schedule, you have to wait until he is free. For example, if you feel that a certain actor would be best for this film, then you wait for him. If he is sick right now, you wait for him to recover; if he happens to be with another crew and his previous film is not finished yet, then you wait for him to finish. If you especially want him to act, you have to wait for him. The same principle applies here — if you want someone, you have to wait for him in that in-between zone, wait until he dies, and only then can the two of you reincarnate into the human world together once more.

Collective Reincarnation and Individual Cycles

He then went on to say that there are many periods of projection. What is projection? If you want to communicate telepathically with someone, and if they are on the same level as you, then it is very simple; but if they are not on the same level, then you have to project yourself onto their level, project your image over there to discuss with them, to communicate with them.

Some people are lone wolves; they do not come with others at all, they come and go entirely on their own. Their reincarnation is also a solo affair: they do not form factions, do not seek out relatives or friends, do not seek out classmates or close friends; they just come when they come. They do not have any strong emotional attachment to the various historical periods on Earth before incarnating -- they do not favor a particular dynasty or historical period, nor do they have any special feelings for the particular people in it; they simply have no feeling about it, and they reincarnate when it is time to reincarnate. They prefer to be alone.

There are also people who like to return together with their contemporaries from a particular historical period in the past, so there are some patterns of collective reincarnation, but among them, many people -- not all -- are involved together in the cycle of reincarnation. There are also people who like to reincarnate at the same time together with good brothers, good buddies, good friends, and good relatives. To be honest, this also happens often -- they agree to go into the next life together to experience something, or because there is something they need to learn together, or something that may not have been completed in the previous life, so they come together in the next life. This is like forming a team when playing a game: a few of you form a team and go into a particular dungeon together to complete a quest; this is very normal. This is the process of collective reincarnation.

But it is not everyone; it is many people, most but not all. Not all the people in your life reincarnate together with you; only some important people will come back and enter into the next reincarnation cycle.

Then he gave an example, speaking to Rob:

For example, you are not operating within such a cycle.

Rob does not reincarnate with a group of people; it is not that kind of large cycle. A large cycle is somewhat like the cycle of an era or the cycle of a dynasty -- we often find that in a certain period there is a group of people who are especially united; they accomplish something together, form an organization or an alliance, and achieve something great. Whether they jointly start a business and build a Fortune 500 company, or jointly establish a revolutionary organization, both are possible; this kind is called a large cycle and period. He told Rob that he is not like this, but he does have an individual cycle -- your family members may reincarnate together. You do not come to reincarnate with a group of good brothers, good buddies, or good comrades-in-arms; you often reincarnate together with your family members, a much smaller number of people. The purpose of your reincarnation is also not to accomplish great deeds or do something grand; you are only focused on your family life. So you may reincarnate together with family members; this is an individual cycle.

They will take on different relationships with one another -- the next time they reincarnate, the relationship will be different. In the previous life the two of you were father and son; in the next life you may be husband and wife. Is this relationship what you humans imagine it to be? It is extremely complex.

Do Not Pry Into Past Lives

Many people do a very foolish thing—they especially want to see what their past life was. I do not know where their starting point is. Maybe they feel that this life is not going well, so it must be because of something they did in a previous life, and they want to see exactly what they did in that previous life that led to the problems of this life—that is one type, those dissatisfied with their present situation. Others are purely curious.

I suggest you do not go looking at your previous life. What is past is past. It will not be forgotten in the depths of your memory, in the depths of your soul—not a single thing, not a single object will be forgotten. As I said earlier, after you die there is a process of review or looking back, and at that time you are together with your entity, and you will clearly know all your reincarnations; nothing will be lost. But when you reincarnate into the human world, do not keep remembering it—the soul has designed it for you so that you forget it all, and it is preserved only in your deepest underlying layer, and you are not allowed to access it. It is as if this folder is encrypted, top secret, and the materials of this life are not for you to see; you simply do not know them.

You say, I insist on seeing it, and you go look through channeling, hypnosis, and other such methods. But you do not understand why it was sealed off for you. Looking at it this way actually brings you no help and no benefit, and in many cases it is not beneficial. First, these things have already happened, and you cannot change them—although it can be said that they can be changed, you do not now possess that level of realm or the ability of spiritual practice, so you have no way to change these things that have already happened in history. Second, when you discover the relationship between the people now very close to you and your previous life, you will be utterly devastated. For example, if you discover that your current husband was your father in a previous life, how will you handle the relationship from now on? You will feel that this is completely incestuous. But from the perspective of the soul, there is no concept of incest, no concept of worldly morality; this is simply the soul's choice and experience. It is like when we act in a play: this person plays the son, that person plays the mother, but in real life they may be of the same generation. Two people playing husband and wife each have their own husbands and wives, yet in the play they still have to perform passionate scenes or even bed scenes, because each of them has their own life. And then you insist on exposing this, insist on uncovering what your past life was really about.

I advise everyone: do not go prying into your past lives. That is a matter of your previous life, and you have already finished living it, so put all your energy and attention on your present moment. Do not be like a gossipy person, thinking every day about what my past life was like, whom I met, and so on. Going after that will only make you more depressed and more devastated. Since it does not let you know, there is a reason it does not let you know. When it is time for you to know, it will naturally let you know—for example, when you die, it lets you know everything. At that time, knowing is not a problem, because you have left the physical body, you have no more bodily attachments, and you have become a purely soul existence. You no longer have gender, no longer have the distinction of male and female; you are a purely spiritual existence. But while you still have a physical body, if you insist on understanding these experiences in the subconscious, it will produce great mental derangement and emotional confusion, and this confusion is very dangerous.

Not letting you see is purposeful. So do not keep asking what your past life was. But if you say you really want to see it, that you are just curious, that is fine too, no problem. If you say it is just for gossip, you want to know, and this interest has already become greater than your interest in living your future life well, then it is also fine for you to go look it up. There is no right or wrong here; it is not that you cannot look, or that looking will bring you some retribution in this life, or that leaking heavenly secrets will do your life any harm—none of that exists. I am only explaining to you from the standpoint of reason why you should not go looking.

The Depth of Exploration

In reincarnational existence, you can explore different depths. Some people choose total immersion, wholehearted immersion. It is like the process of acting: some actors choose a fully immersive performance, becoming one with the character. Some actors, in order to play a soldier, live in the military for half a year or a year, completely immersing themselves in military life. When he plays a soldier at war, it is more authentic, and he also understands the feelings between comrades in the military—this understanding does not come from reading the script or the lines, but from living within that military unit, truly feeling the comradeship and the deep bond of brotherhood on the battlefield. He can genuinely experience it.

There are also people who, in order to play the role of a rural woman, live for a period of time in a very remote village. The role they perform is especially lifelike, like a natural performance—it does not seem like acting, but like the person herself. This kind of natural performance has a certain amount of life experience behind it; it is wholehearted immersion. But some actors are obviously fake at a glance, clearly performing by reading the script and the lines, completely unfamiliar with the environment and background of the character. Some actresses, in order to play a woman living at the bottom of society, will even go to such a place and live for a period of time, disguising themselves as someone from the lower strata of society, going through the rough and tumble for a while, and the role they perform is especially lifelike.

So in reincarnation, the depth you want to go into is something you can choose; it is not the same for everyone. Some people are especially immersed; these people specialize in physical life—just as actors immerse themselves in life, they specialize in the experience of the role itself. Their knowledge of this system is the broadest. What is meant by this system? It is the earthly world, the social and cultural aspects. In order to obtain this knowledge, they need to have lived through every one of your races—having been European, Asian, white, yellow, black, trying out all kinds of people, including trying out every ethnic group. For most people, there is no such requirement; you do not need this. When you reincarnate, you are only experiencing what you have learned—emotional, spiritual, and soul-level learning, experience, and progress are sufficient. Race is irrelevant; whatever race you are, the things you experience are the same—not exactly the same, but largely similar with minor differences. But if you insist that you must try every single one, that the same setup must be tried across all different skin colors, countries, and periods, that you want to study this and understand this, focusing on this kind of earthly life and finding it especially interesting—

such a person is like a very professional actor, filming many, many dramas, putting tremendous effort into every single one, playing every role with great diligence. He keeps taking on new roles, one drama after another, constantly interweaving. For most people, there is no such requirement; you do not need this, but some people do it.

They are intensely preoccupied with historic periods.

What does "historic" mean? It means the moments when major historical events occur. They especially like to come back and participate at the key turning points of human historical development, at the moments when great events happen. They are not interested in the uneventful periods of human history; they are only interested in those dramatic, earth-shaking historical periods. So these people mostly die young, but they live with great intensity.

They experience far more lifetimes than most people. This passage seems simple, but it contains many deep implications. For example, revolutionaries—in every period of history there have been rebellious revolutionaries, and such revolutionaries often live with extreme intensity, never giving up until they achieve their goal. They are not balanced at all; they are focused on a single goal, participating in this process. Because they want revolution, they are easily executed by the old forces, so such people are often killed at a young age because of their revolutionary activities. But in their short twenty or thirty years of life, they live with great passion and intensity, and in this process they experience deeply, going into very great depth. After they die, it is not a pity, because they have, in effect, condensed a lifetime—they experienced too many things in that lifetime; that lifetime was a concentrated essence.

He lived for a very short time, and after death he reincarnates again. Compared with a bland old person who lives to ninety, he may have already reincarnated three times. He has had three extremely intense, concentrated life experiences. So this type of person wants to experience excessively, to experience everything.

In other words, they return to as many historic periods as possible.

His "historic periods" does not refer to just any point in history, but to the turning points of history, the moments when great events occur. "Historic periods" would be better translated as "historic moments"—as we often say, "this moment must be recorded in the annals of history"; it is that kind of moment. Because they want to participate in such activities, they are willing to reincarnate many times, so they do not live too long.

They finally help form the world that you know.

This sentence is also very important. If you read it the way you would ordinarily read a text, you would not understand at all what he is saying. These people, those who exert themselves deeply, those who want to explore great depth—precisely because they reincarnate again and again and participate in the historical periods of the development of human society, they have changed and created the world we have now. It is they who, in different periods of the development of human society, through their participation and promotion—through their revolutions and active movements—have caused human society to keep moving forward. So they are meaningful to the development of human society.

You will find that many revolutionaries and agents of historical change—like the various reforms of ancient times: Shang Yang's reforms, Wang Anshi's reforms, the Hundred Days' Reform of the modern era—those who promote social development and change often do not end up particularly well, because the old forces are too powerful. But although these people may not have seen the results of world transformation while they were alive, when we look back at this history, it was precisely because of the existence of these people that the spark was lit. The flame that started the prairie fire had a profound impact on the whole of human society. Although he is already dead, his influence is enormous, and it will lead to later social transformation and the development and progress of human society.

This is the characteristic of this type of person—their temperament is extremely intense, they are fixated on one particular thing, and they will never give up until they achieve their goal. Many people think that if you do this you will die, you will lose your head, your little life will be gone, but these people give you the feeling that they do not care at all, that they are not concerned with life or death. He simply does not think about this question; he is entirely for his ideal—the ideal of reform, the ideal of revolution, the ideal of promoting human development—this is the pursuit of his life's mission. When you see this, you understand why many people act this way: this is his mission; he came precisely to do this.

The Traveler

Then Seth said some things related to Rob and Jane's personal situation -- the three of them had once lived in Denmark, when they were together in their last reincarnation. I won't go into that. Including that Rob's interest in seventeenth-century art, he also felt it was connected to his having reincarnated in that century. We will also find that certain people are especially interested in certain things -- some people especially like antique furniture, Ming and Qing dynasty furniture, the simplicity of Song dynasty furniture, or the ornate intricacy of Qing dynasty pieces; some people just like the calligraphy, painting, and art of a certain period, and they can't say why they like it so intensely. There is a reason for this.

In any case, even before your first reincarnation had begun, you were all travelers.

This sentence is also very profound. Many people ask: when did I begin my first reincarnation? Before my first life there was no previous life, so how do I sum up the experience of the previous life? How does it work like the in-between zone described earlier? How did my first life begin? This is a question many people get stuck on. He tells you here, don't get stuck on this question -- because before you began reincarnating on Earth, you were all already travelers, already on the road.

I'll put it as simply as I can: when you enter this physical reality system, you do not necessarily all have the same background.

As I said earlier, life on Earth is a training stage, but I hope you will forget, as much as possible, your general concepts of progress.

Every sentence he says carries a huge amount of information. You must think it over repeatedly; you can't just read it like ordinary text and move on.

First, when you reincarnate on Earth, don't have the feeling of a first life or a second life. There is no such thing. There is no concept of linear time. Which one is the first life and which is the second life -- all of that is said only in terms of Earth time, for the convenience of describing this process, for the convenience of narrating this matter. You must understand that this is only for the convenience of your understanding. It's like in Buddhism, where they use worldly methods to draw you in, and then expound the truth to you on the level of ultimate truth. That truth is truth for you in the present moment, but it is not the real truth. It's like an escalator, one step at a time carrying you upward. If they told you the most real truth of the universe from the very beginning, you couldn't accept it. So Seth speaks according to the human sequence of time. Look at Chapter 9, when he talks about the world after death, right at the beginning he says "in your terms." From Chapter 9, Chapter 10, Chapter 11, and onward, when he talks about the world after death, he is always speaking in language we humans can understand. You must never think that this is the fact, that after death things develop exactly the way he describes. It is only like this on a certain level, on a certain logical level. In reality, all of these are developing simultaneously; on the level without the concept of time, they all happen in the same instant.

Many people don't understand why the concept of time is like this. They firmly believe that time is a one-way concept, from left to right, from front to back, from past to future, like a river. This is humanity's deep-rooted concept of time. Let's look at it from another angle -- think of time as a vertical axis, a longitudinal axis. You stand in the middle; looking down is the past, looking up is the future, and standing in the middle at this moment is the present. Your past, present, and future are all on this same vertical axis, not on a horizontal axis. It is not a process of continuation from front to back, not a continuation of "one second, the next second, the next second after that." It is a vertical axis. You can see both upward and downward, depending on which way you look. If you only look straight ahead, then that is your present life, your present lifetime -- living in the present. If you want to look down, that is your past, and it is still happening; it has not ended. It is not that your past has ended. Looking up, you are also happening and participating in different historical periods of the future.

Many people say: how can I as one person be in the past, the present, and the future at the same time? This is where the limits of human understanding lie. You think one person can only exist in one place at one time. But from the perspective of physics, each of you is a kind of quantum state; your whole person is flickering and unstable -- in an extremely short time, you may split into billions of parts, and your identity lives in different times and spaces. The reason you feel that you are living on Earth in this instant is because it changes so fast that you think you are living continuously on Earth. And another you in another time and space also thinks it is living continuously in that time and space. In fact, you are living in all times and spaces simultaneously.

It's like a super-fast person who was over there one instant and is over here the next, existing simultaneously in different times and spaces. When you look up at the heavens and down at the earth, all of your lives exist within that single glance. This is a real phenomenon, but humans find it very hard to understand, so he explains it to you in this way -- your previous life, your next life, a transitional stage in between, a rest period between reincarnations, and so on. But you must never forget that the premise of what he says is that it is spoken from the human perspective, in your terms.

At this point, don't get stuck on questions like what your previous life was or where your first life came from. These are all spoken from the human perspective. You might ask: from the human perspective, is there a first life? Yes, there is. In terms of chronological order, there is certainly a first point in time when you reincarnated on Earth. But by now you can understand: what you call your first life on Earth may not be the first life for your soul -- it may have come back from the future to be born, wanting to experience life in that period, but for the soul it may already be the fourth or fifth reincarnation. But in terms of Earth time, it is the earliest appearance on this timeline. If you speak in terms of Earth time, this is its first time; but from the perspective of the soul's reincarnations, this may be its fourth or fifth time, already not the first. So he says that before your first reincarnation began, you were already travelers -- you had already reincarnated many times before this.

The meaning of the second sentence is that when you enter the material world, enter the world of Earth, each person's background is different. You don't know how many times this soul has already reincarnated -- whether it is an old soul or a new soul -- so the backgrounds are different. It's like what they say in martial arts or spiritual practice: this person's root capacity is different, their root capacity varies. Some people have very good root capacity, some people have very shallow root capacity -- this is not meant as discrimination or contempt, just a statement of fact. Some people have already cultivated very well, so when they reincarnate again their root capacity is very good; some people haven't cultivated yet, or have cultivated only shallowly, so their root capacity is lacking, and no matter how much you say to them, they can't understand. Some people get it with a single hint, understand as soon as it's said. Everyone's root capacity is different.

Then he says, as I said earlier, life in the human world is reincarnation, and it is a process of training. Actually it's not training; it is a process of experience, a process of creation. In a certain sense, it is also a process of learning and training, but you can't understand it that way. This principle will only be elaborated later. You must never treat the three-dimensional world as a learning process -- you are not here to learn, you are here to create. You are a分身 of the Creator, come into this world to co-create this world. You are the one creating the world. As we have said, your beliefs, thoughts, and emotions create the world around you.

You did not come into the three-dimensional world to explore, not to learn. It's not like the mindset of a tourist -- I'll go look here, look there, learn about the pyramids, understand ancient Egyptian civilization, go to Mexico to understand Mayan civilization, go to South America to understand ancient Inca culture. No. You are not here to marvel at how advanced ancient Egyptian culture was or how glorious ancient Inca culture was; you are here to create your own history, to create your own world. You have this ability. The reason you are here reincarnating is to create, not to carry a little textbook, take notes, highlight the key points, and leave once you've finished studying. It is not like that. Your beliefs must change. Training and learning are only from the perspective of an analogy; more than that, you are here to create this world.

So at this point he hopes you can forget your general concepts of progress. What is progress? It's what was said earlier -- you don't know what your background was when you reincarnated into the human world. You don't know what kind of soul you were born from, don't remember your previous life or the life before that, or what all your reincarnations were like. So don't think that in this life your abilities are lacking in every way, that you're dull and foolish, as if there's been no progress. That's not it. Don't think in terms of progress. It was also said earlier that your concept of progress is not fixed; sometimes suppressing a certain ability is actually a better way to learn that ability.

The concepts of good, better, and best will lead you astray.

You must understand that right now you absolutely cannot have this discriminating mind -- I must be good, must be better, must be best, must be perfect. If you think about things this way, then you have completely misunderstood the purpose and meaning of the soul's reincarnation. The soul reincarnates into the human world not to become better, best, or to reach some state. This is everyone's misunderstanding. Everyone thinks reincarnation is for the soul to accumulate experience, and once the experience has taught the soul, the soul will get better and better -- we are helping it learn and improve. This is wrong.

First, you separate yourself from the soul, and that in itself is a fundamental error. You set yourself in opposition to the soul, thinking of yourself as a little ant, while the soul is a greater existence that sends you into the human world to reincarnate -- you suffer, and it gains the experience. Some people curse in the street, saying, "I'm the one who suffers, and you get the experience." This kind of thinking forcibly splits oneself from the soul. The soul is the soul, I am me -- isn't that a fundamental error? Don't forget that you are the soul, you are a part of this soul. How can you separate yourself from yourself?

Second, don't use human concepts of good, better, and best to understand the soul's progress. If you hold this view, he says you are going astray. Using human concepts of progress to think about the soul's progress is going astray. It is not like that.

This is a misunderstanding shared by many spiritual practitioners. Why do many practitioners get stuck there, or sometimes go astray into obsession? They get stuck right here. They always think of themselves as developing from one stage to a better stage; they always believe there is a better stage, a higher standard, a more perfect state, and they are progressing toward that stage, and this life's reincarnation is one step closer to that goal. They can never change this belief in their minds. When they practice with this belief, they become attached to this so-called progress, attached to the so-called progress. Many religious masters, including Buddhist masters and masters of various religions, many people get stuck on the word "progress." In spiritual practice terminology it is called "diligent progress." Every day they ask whether you have made diligent progress, every day they ask; others ask them, and they interrogate themselves. They always feel there is a higher goal to achieve, and they concentrate all their energy on it.

Seth tells you, this is wrong. Just this one passage can awaken so many people in spiritual practice. If these people saw this passage, they would suddenly see the light. Where is there better? Where is there best? Your present moment is already the best; you are already in the best state right now. And you still go chasing after the best state -- isn't that abandoning the root to chase the branches? Riding a donkey looking for a donkey -- you are riding on the donkey, riding on the truth, wandering all over the world saying you're going to find the truth. You are the truth, so what truth are you looking for? You don't go create your own life, don't go create your own world, but every day you go looking for truth -- isn't that... you still haven't understood that you are practicing. Every day saying, today I went up a level, tomorrow I went up another level.

Many people have written many books; I won't go into that. I can sum it up in one phrase, the four-line verse of Huineng, the Sixth Patriarch -- everyone who has studied Buddhism knows it:

Bodhi originally has no tree, the bright mirror is also not a stand; originally there is not a single thing, where could dust alight?⁴

The third line of the four-line verse is the most important -- originally there is not a single thing. Its meaning is that from the very beginning until now, this world has had nothing at all. He does not have a sense of materialization. The phrase "originally there is not a single thing" is used very precisely -- it does not mean there is no soul, no spiritual things; it means material things do not exist. All the so-called material things you speak of do not exist. Since originally there is not a single thing, since there are no material things, what are you chasing after? What is that progress being compared against? So on this level, everyone must make a change. If you can't understand it all at once, then let's slowly keep reading, and understand it to whatever degree you can.

Learning to Exist as Completely as Possible

He also said:

You are learning to exist as completely as possible.

This sentence, again, woke up a lot of people. You are not here to progress, not here to become better; you are here to experience all possibilities, to create all possibilities. In other words, to put it more bluntly -- your soul is originally self-sufficient. The Buddha said you are originally self-sufficient, and other spiritual teachings also say you already have everything; your soul lacks nothing. If a person is originally self-sufficient, and you still want to be better, to improve further -- doesn't that prove you are lacking? Only if you are lacking can there be better; only if you are lacking can you improve. If you believe you are originally self-sufficient, what is there to improve? What is there to improve upon? The Buddha said every person has Buddha-nature, and every person is at the same level as the Buddha. Seth says that within each of you dwells a soul, and this soul is a part of the entity, and the entity is in turn a part of All That Is. In other words, you have a very deep connection with the Creator and with the origin of this world.

From the perspective of the Tao Te Ching, it is the same. Chapter 25 says Heaven is great, Earth is great, humanity is great, and the Tao is great -- all are equally great. There are four greatnesses in Heaven. Humanity models itself on Earth, Earth models itself on Heaven, Heaven models itself on the Tao, and the Tao models itself on what is naturally so.⁵ A human being is not an ordinary thing; the greatest point about a person is that the essence of their soul and the essence of the Creator -- the two are identical in substance, of one body and one source. In this case, you are a person who is originally self-sufficient.

Let us continue with the topic of the previous chapter. Since your soul is originally self-sufficient, what is there left for you to improve? Where would you improve toward? You are a part of the Creator of this world; this world is something you yourself created. What is there left to improve, and relative to whom would you improve? So here, if you cannot understand that you are originally self-sufficient, you will fall into a spiritual trap -- always wanting to improve yourself. You do not need to improve yourself; what you need to do is to express yourself, to put into practice, through actual experience, the abilities and understanding that are already complete within you. You are a person who possesses all abilities; what you need to do now is to practice them, to express them.

In this process, what you need to learn is not knowledge itself, nor ability itself, but how to express your abilities in different environments and in different forms. If your abilities need to be learned, then what needs to be learned is this aspect -- how to create, how to implement. But the abilities themselves are already complete; you do not need to improve yourself in these abilities, only in their implementation. Actually, even this is not needed. Why not? Think about it: every day you are creating the world around you. You have never studied spiritual practice, nor studied creation, so how is it that right now you are able to create all the world around you? How did your environment come about? It is produced by belief -- this was already covered in Chapter 5. You never studied this; you create it naturally and spontaneously. This ability of yours is so great that your present conscious self cannot even begin to match it; it can create what your present conscious self does not know how to create. But your inner self, your instinctive self -- it can create. The environment shifts with the mind. In the instant when you are unaware, when you do not even know it, it has already created everything; its ability is extremely strong. So what is there left for you to learn? What you need to learn is not how to create these things -- you already have this ability; you do not need to learn its principles or its scientific reasoning. What you need to learn is what you want to create. What you want to do -- that is what expresses the value of your soul.

You Are Only Responsible for Making Your Puzzle Piece Well

Your soul wants to experience all completely possible existences. So what you need to learn is to bring out all your possibilities. What does existence mean? We covered this in the previous chapter, so I won't repeat it here -- it is when you truly use your soul to experience the present moment, when you truly realize that you exist, only then is it called existence. In other words, you need to bring out all the abilities of your soul, bring out all the possibilities of every possible existence.

Your life should be like a jigsaw puzzle, not a great palace built from the ground up -- laying the foundation, building the main structure, decorating, finishing -- it is not that process. Your palace is already completely built; it is simply made up of countless puzzle pieces. You only need to live this one small puzzle piece of yours well, live it brilliantly, and bring it to its greatest potential. When you piece together this one life of yours, it becomes a magnificent and splendid picture of life.

How do you piece together this picture? How do you bring out this one small piece even better, so that the color and shape of this small piece fit just right within the overall chapter of your life, within your grand picture of life? You say, I want every life to be dazzling and colorful, all warm tones and bright tones -- but if everything is bright tones, wouldn't the whole picture turn out to be a vast expanse of white? Then it wouldn't be a picture anymore; it would be a blank board. You say, every life should be lived brilliantly, with no regrets and no shadows -- but shouldn't this life of yours have both good and bad? From the human perspective, from the soul's perspective, in one life you are strong in a certain aspect, and in another life you are not strong in that aspect, producing different tones, colors, and shapes. Only when the puzzle of life is pieced together this way does it look good. If it were all one color, one tone, wouldn't it be unattractive? And your purpose is to make every puzzle piece well. By "well," you must not have the concept of progress here -- it is not about pursuing better, but about making each puzzle piece to its utmost. This "better" is not a concept of progress; it is about making it into what it should be, bringing out your abilities, that is all. If you should create, then create; the world you create is this puzzle piece. When you have finished creating all the puzzle pieces and put them together, the chapter of your life emerges, and the sense of a grand picture emerges.

When we connect with the entity, when we come to know the entity, when we communicate with the entity after death, we are communicating about where the next piece of this great puzzle is, and what this great picture is. Only then do we know which part, which piece, this small puzzle piece of our one life is within the entire great painting, and what color, what tone it should be. What do you communicate with the entity about? What do you learn from the entity? You recall all past history with the entity, which is recalling the entire puzzle. In fact, the entity is you, it is your soul. When you return to the level of the soul, you know what this puzzle looks like, and then you know what position this reincarnation of yours occupies within the puzzle, and what color, what tone, what lines it should have. You come with this mission, make this puzzle piece well, and that is enough; next time you go and paint the next piece. This is the meaning of your essence.

Do not go astray; do not paint every piece in glittering gold. If all the puzzle pieces were one expanse of golden radiance, there would be no such thing as a picture. So sometimes it is perfectly normal for some puzzle pieces to be black, and it is perfectly normal for some lives to be bleak, because the entire puzzle needs some dark details and colors.

You Came Into This Life to Paint Your Piece of It

Seth says:

Learn complete existence as best you can. (Session 541)

On the other hand, you are learning to create yourself. This sentence is also extremely important. This session was delivered very slowly, precisely because every sentence in it is a gem, and for many people each one is a wake-up call. He says, first, you should make every puzzle piece as well as you can; second, you should learn to create yourself. This sentence must be underlined. What did you come into this life to do? You did not come into this life to go explore something; you came to create. Create whom? Create the larger picture of this puzzle. What is this larger picture? The larger picture is you, it is this soul, it is this entity, and it needs you to create it. In other words, the soul has a picture in its mind, and this picture is made up of countless small puzzle pieces. Your whole life is about bringing that picture in the soul's mind into realization.

This soul is you. You have a painting in your mind, and this painting needs to be painted stroke by stroke, piece by piece, and you came into this life to do exactly that. Many people ask, can I change this painting? Of course you can. Every small puzzle piece determines what color the whole painting will be, so this painting is always in a state of change. The painting you have in your mind and the painting that actually gets produced are not entirely identical. It is not that once you imagine a painting in your mind you can paint it; between the imagining and the painting there is still the practice of your abilities and the limitations of various conditions. And your whole life is about painting this picture you imagine in your mind, painting this picture of the soul. What you are to complete in this lifetime is one small puzzle piece within this larger painting. This is the process of creating your life, creating yourself, fulfilling yourself. When that painting is complete, you are complete as well — you are painting a small part of yourself, painting your self-portrait.

So do not carry around concepts of better or best. There is no such concept. It is simply about realizing the creation of yourself. You are originally complete and need nothing better; the purpose of your original completeness is to create. You possess the Creator's ability for the sake of creating, not for the sake of learning and experiencing. You do not need to learn these things; you only need to roll up your sleeves and get to work, to create the world around you. Whatever you want to do, you can do; whatever you want to create, you can create; just go create. If your current state of life is not one of creating, but one of following a routine, living for the sake of living, working just to put food on the table, just to keep this physical body alive, then that is not the purpose for which you came into the human world. You came into the human world to create.

The Meaning of the Three-Dimensional World

Seth says:

When you do this in the cycle of reincarnation, you focus your primary abilities on physical life, while also developing human qualities and characteristics, and then open up new dimensions of activity. (Session 541)

The preceding content has already described this grand picture. When you return to the human world, your primary abilities are focused on physical life -- that is certain, most of our daily life is physical life. But within this physical life, you need to develop human qualities and characteristics. Human qualities and characteristics are a very important part of the larger map of the soul. You have this ability, but you need to develop it, practice it, and create it. This is what we are doing in the three-dimensional world, and each of us is doing it -- exercising our qualities, raising our personal qualities, not the quality of life, but human qualities, human character, and human characteristics.

And then open up new dimensions of activity. What does "new dimensions of activity" mean? Dimensions of activity, that is, opening up new dimensions -- creating things that have never existed before. If you create something that did not exist before, then for you, you have opened up a new dimension, a new world. While you develop your character and characteristics in the physical world, your character and characteristics are developed, which is equivalent to opening up new dimensions of activity. In other words, through learning, through practice, through understanding, you develop the focusing ability of your consciousness. You know that your consciousness has many levels, not just the single focusing level of the three-dimensional world before your eyes. You can focus on various different levels. When you learn this ability and develop it, for you it is equivalent to opening up a new world. This world previously did not exist for you at all, but in fact it has always existed, only you did not know it. Now that you know it, does that not equal opening up a new world, a new dimension? This is the meaning of the three-dimensional world. He tells you that living in the three-dimensional world, your value and meaning are right here.

But this does not mean there is no such thing as "good" in the world. It does not mean there is no better, no best, and so one should not seek the good in anything, muddling along, just going through the motions day by day -- anyway, it does not matter, the picture of the soul has already been designed, and I, this little figure, can just casually pick up a couple of brushes and dab a few strokes, and such a large puzzle will not be missing my one piece anyway. That is wrong of you. It is not that you will not progress, and it is not that there is no good, but rather that our concepts of good and progress are extremely distorted, extremely twisted. What is being said here is that our understanding of good and progress is built upon the level of our human cognition. If you place this good and bad onto the large, grand picture of the soul, both good and bad must be reconsidered. What you think is good may not necessarily be good, what you think is progress may not necessarily be progress, and what you think is a painful life and painful experience may in fact be something you need in your progress.

The Uniqueness of the Soul

Seth says:

Many personalities have remarkable talents in certain special areas.

This one sentence encapsulates a great deal. Many people have different talents in certain special fields. For example, some people have an exceptionally strong artistic sense, and no matter what level of art they engage with, their ability is particularly strong. Some people are exceptionally strong in mathematics—math geniuses, for whom the essence of mathematics is clear at a glance.

These abilities may appear again and again in successive lives. (Session 541)

Your artistic ability, your artistic talent, will appear again and again throughout your successive lives. They may be adjusted, increased or decreased, but the essence will manifest, used in various different combinations. It is like adjusting attribute points in a game—perhaps in one life this aspect is stronger, and in another life that aspect is stronger, but these characteristics are all your own, bearing your distinct personal stamp. Note that he says "special areas, remarkable"—this is yours, different from others; your abilities are different from other people's. They can be increased or decreased, combined, or not combined.

But on the whole, they remain the most prominent mark of this person's individuality and uniqueness. (Session 541)

So the soul is not one-size-fits-all, and souls are not all exactly alike. Each soul's own characteristics, uniqueness, and individuality are extremely strong and extremely distinct. This soul is different from that soul.

Across all reincarnational lives, most people may take up different professions, livelihoods, interests, and life trajectories—completely different. But for certain people, there is indeed a very clear thread of continuity. In this life they are a man, in the next life a woman; in this life a doctor, in the next life a teacher—all different, but if you look at the whole, at all the reincarnational lives, there is a very clear thread of continuity running through these people. All the reincarnational lives of this soul must bear his distinct personal characteristics and uniqueness. This has to be seen from the overall perspective. Looking at any single life alone, you cannot see it, because without comparison, without contrast, you cannot summarize or identify the characteristics. But when you look at all his reincarnational lives as a whole, you will find a very clear thread of continuity within them. It may occasionally be interrupted—perhaps in a certain life he does something unrelated to his uniqueness—but it is always there. An interruption does not mean it is gone; the characteristics of that personality, the personality characteristics of the soul, are always here, it is just that sometimes conditions do not allow them to be expressed.

Important Choices Between Lives

Seth says:

In this book there will be much on reincarnation, much material specifically devoted to reincarnation, but here I want to point out that in this period of choice between lives, many issues are at stake. (Session 541)

We will talk a lot about reincarnation, but remember this: the reincarnational life is important, and the process of choosing in between reincarnations is also extremely important. It is a matter of great consequence, not just a simple matter of taking a new body. The in-between zone is not such a simple thing.

Seth says:

In some cases, certain personalities may be given a vacation outside of the usual routine.

This is a special case. What he is saying is "not common" -- some personalities may be given a vacation outside of the usual routine. It is like when you are very busy at work, and your employer gives you a holiday to travel abroad.

Taking time to travel to other levels of reality on a journey from which one may not return, or from which one may return repeatedly.

Letting you go to a reality you have never been to, to other levels, for a short-term journey. This is not reincarnation, and it is not rebirth either; it is a journey. Reincarnation is also like a journey, but that is a long journey of several decades, whereas this is a short-term one.

This is about the possibilities of choice after death. You may also take a vacation, go to an alien world or a higher-dimensional world to experience it, and you may also go to a lower-dimensional world. Of course, the possibility of a higher dimension is greater; you would not go to a lower one, because your soul experiences from low to high, and it is impossible to experience again something that has already been experienced. Many people ask whether after death one will be reborn as an animal, become a cat or a dog, become a hungry ghost, or fall into the six realms of reincarnation -- whether if you did not do good deeds in your previous life, you will fall down there in your next life. Once you have studied Seth, you will understand that all of this is impossible, nonexistent, and utter nonsense.

Why would one not reincarnate as an animal? It is not that one cannot reincarnate as an animal; if one wanted to, one could. But why would one want to reincarnate as an animal? To put it in plain terms, one has already evolved to the human level; one's spiritual state and one's soul level have already reached the human level. Would one still go and experience the life of a cat or a dog? What strong sense of achievement do cats and dogs have, and what can they create? It is like saying you have already graduated from college -- would you now go back to kindergarten and study there for a few more years? You would rather die than go. You may choose not to go on to graduate school or a doctorate, but you will not go back to take kindergarten courses. So can a human reincarnate as an animal? It is not a question of whether one can reincarnate, nor a question of whether one has the ability; it is simply that one would never make that choice. That option does not exist among all of one's options. It is like when you graduate from college and someone asks what you are going to do -- the option of going to kindergarten simply does not exist. You can regard this as a process of soul ascension -- the soul only moves upward, not downward. As for traveling to other levels for a tour, this kind of situation is not common, and it is also decided at this moment.

Three Post-Death Choices

Seth says:

Those who have completed their reincarnational cycles and have chosen to leave the system have more decisions to make. (Session 541)

Those who have already completed their reincarnations and no longer need to reincarnate have already released all their talents and potentials. They do not need to return to this system, and since they are about to leave the earth, their choices are more numerous and more complex.

Seth says:

Enter the realm of probabilities. (Session 541)

You have three major choices. The first is reincarnation. The second is to take the material from the subconscious back and rehearse it over and over, learn it over and over, and from that subconscious material learn many things and create many things. The third is to enter a system of probabilities. There are higher and lower levels among these. Reincarnation is the most elementary. In the second, you no longer need to reincarnate; you can arrange your own plays and act in them yourself in the middle zone. You do not need to experience through a physical body, and without the physical process you can still experience creation and fulfill the soul's mission on your own. The third is going to a higher world called the world of probabilities to reincarnate.

After entering the realm of probabilities, you can also enter into reincarnational cycles, and it can be compared to reincarnation. But he tells you that although this is similar to reincarnation, strictly speaking it is no longer called reincarnation, and there is no better term for it here. You can understand it as countless parallel universes developing simultaneously. You carry all the memories of past lives, all the memories of the soul from previous lives, all the memories of the entity, and you enter into a simultaneous universe to develop simultaneously.

For example, take the big picture of a life and turn it into ten thousand puzzle pieces. Before, you painted one piece at a time—you reincarnated once in the human world, completed one puzzle piece, and had to reincarnate ten thousand times to complete the whole puzzle. That is the first mode of reincarnation. In the second mode, after you reincarnate once, you do not need to reincarnate a second time. In the middle zone you take the material from that first reincarnation and arrange and combine it over and over, and after experiencing all the various possibilities, you can paint out a whole section. You only need to reincarnate once to paint several pieces, then reincarnate again and paint a few more—you do not need to paint piece by piece. It is like the puzzle having many similar pieces around it, with similar colors and tones; you only need to experience one reincarnation, and the rest are painted by repeatedly extrapolating the various possibilities from the material of that one reincarnation. That is the second choice.

In the third choice, you as a person know what the whole picture looks like, and you paint ten thousand small pieces simultaneously, with ten thousand reincarnations happening at the same time. But when painting this picture simultaneously, each puzzle piece is interconnected with the others. To complete the whole picture, coordination and cooperation are required in the middle, so when each puzzle piece is being done simultaneously, the coordination and communication among them is extremely complex. In other words, all the possibilities of your soul's reincarnations are put together for you to experience and create.

He says:

You may think of it as reincarnation, but it is an entirely different type of reality, in which there will be a constant, unchanging focus of awareness. (Session 541)

This is not easy to understand. Our worldview is one of change. Each time we reincarnate, we shift into a reality space, which is equivalent to changing our worldview once. But in the system of probabilities it is unchanging—his focus is always on the whole picture, on the big picture of the whole life, so he has a constant, unchanging focus. This actually goes beyond the scope of what we humans can comprehend.

Seth says:

When such a choice is made, the powers latent in the multidimensional personality, which you have only glimpsed slightly, will be drawn upon and utilized. (Session 541)

After you make this choice, that inner ability of yours, the ability of the entity—which in every lifetime is suppressed by us, sealed deep in memory, and not allowed to be accessed, accessible only after death—is drawn upon and utilized. Actually, you do have this ability; you can experience many lives and many worlds simultaneously. But you think you do not have this ability. You think you can only focus on the present state before your eyes, on this one small puzzle piece in front of you, with no time to attend to the remaining nine thousand nine hundred ninety-nine pieces. But you have this ability. You can say, I do not want to paint piece by piece; I will paint all ten thousand pieces at the same time. But to paint ten thousand pieces simultaneously, you need to have an overall big picture in your mind—and I do have that picture. That is the idea. I will not expand on this here; this is a world of a higher level.

Seth says:

The psychological experience within the system of probabilities is quite different from what you know. (Session 541)

Of course it is. Imagine a scene: suppose you as a person are simultaneously father, mother, and child; grandfather and grandmother; king and beggar; client and prostitute—playing all roles at the same time. I would like to ask, what would your psychological structure be like? It certainly would not be what it is now. He is not saying that you switch roles back and forth—this second I am the father, the next second I am the son—that is not the understanding. That kind of parallel processing structure is completely different from our ordinary linear processing structure, and you cannot understand it. He is only telling you that the psychological structure there is completely different from what it is now.

Seth says:

Here the personality must learn to assemble time and events in an entirely different manner. (Session 541)

Events are completely different. Unlike our linear events, the time and events there are processed in parallel, and how these parallel events are assembled is an entirely different manner.

Seth says:

And without relying upon the structure of events as you know it. (Session 541)

In the system of probabilities, understanding and intuition finally cooperate so well that there is little distinction between them. This is one of its characteristics. In our ordinary three-dimensional world, understanding something and intuiting something use different faculties. Understanding uses the thinking mode—your logic, experience, knowledge, and memory, through your own logical reasoning and analysis. Intuition is what your inner senses give you, what the soul and the inner self give you, the sixth sense—you do not know why, it is just a feeling. For example, when you see something, you just feel that it will turn out a certain way, without any reason.

In human society, the rational aspect and the intuitive aspect are two different aspects. We want to harmonize them and make them work together, not leaning purely toward rationality, nor purely toward intuition—both of those are wrong. We need to combine the two in application, to cooperate, but cooperation is sometimes good and sometimes not. When you reach that reality of probabilities, they no longer need to cooperate; they are basically one—there is little distinction, they are just close to being the same. That is to say, your inner perceptual system directly perceives things, and directly forms experience and understanding on the conscious level, on the rational level. Perception and experience are completed simultaneously in an instant.

When we see an apple now, we think this apple can be eaten and is delicious, because we have tasted the texture of an apple before, have eaten it before, and know what an apple is—this uses your rationality plus intuition. Your liking for the apple itself, that intuitive feeling, is in there. Then you put it in your mouth and take a bite, and through taste, texture, teeth, mouth, and the sensation of the apple being crushed, the apple gives you a complete feeling. This process is necessary in human society. But in the system of probabilities it is direct: your inner senses can directly feel the essence of things, and after feeling the essence you directly gain experience, without needing a rational reaction process, without needing the process of understanding, accepting, summarizing, concluding, and logical analysis.

Very often, your acquisition of a concept is the same as your acquisition of an object. For example, suppose you want to learn quantum mechanics. In the three-dimensional world this is a linear, gradual process: you must first learn the basic knowledge and prerequisite knowledge, study physics and mathematics step by step, and then step by step go through brain analysis to understand it. In the system of probabilities it is not like this. The knowledge of quantum mechanics is placed before you like an apple. You use your inner senses to perceive this apple, and in an instant you completely understand quantum mechanics. The acquisition of a concept is instantaneous, like a block of knowledge installed in your mind. This is very hard to describe in words; one can only say that directness and understanding cooperate instantly, with no distinction. This does not exist in other realities.

You Exist in Two Systems Simultaneously

Seth says:

The you that decides to live a reincarnational life, and the you that chooses to gain experience within a probable system, are the same you, though the personality structure within the systems is quite different. (Session 541)

One you is the you in the human world, and one you is the you in a probable system. They are the same you, the same person. But within the two systems, your personality structure is quite different. It is not just a matter of the physical body—it has no physical body there—the personality structure itself is different.

Seth says:

The personality structure with which you are familiar is but one of many perceptual systems available to you. (Session 541)

The psychological structure, the mode of thinking, the cognitive mode, the perceptual system we are familiar with now—these are all personality structures, and the physical structure is one aspect of it as well. This personality structure is only one of the many perceptual forms of your soul. You have many other perceptual forms. For example, the you that enters the system of probabilities has a personality structure completely different from this one. To put it more bluntly, from your perspective it is not even human, yet it is still doing human things. So we need to understand that we cannot always think about things from a human angle. You exist in many, many other forms.

This point cannot be expanded upon here, because humans cannot imagine something that goes beyond the human. The aliens we imagine all look more or less like us, because our imaginative space is only this big. We cannot imagine something we have never recognized or understood—we simply cannot conceive of it. You can only imagine what you know. Many people talk about what alien life is like, what life in higher dimensions is like—but if you have never experienced it, you cannot imagine it. You cannot even fabricate it.

Seth says:

Probable systems are therefore as complex as the reincarnational system. (Session 541)

In fact, they are even more complex.

Seth says:

I have told you that all actions are simultaneous. (Session 541)

You just now thought of the timeline as a vertical axis, with above and below existing simultaneously. Is the reincarnational you within the system of probabilities also happening simultaneously within that system? It is simultaneous with the you that cycles through reincarnation in the human world. On the one hand, you exist in two systems at the same time. What is the system of probabilities? It is the system that includes all systems; it is the collection of all probabilities. So this is a matter of considering the same thing on two levels, but these two exist simultaneously.

Seth says:

To explain the decisions involved to you, and to separate the events, I must simplify to some degree. (Session 541)

This chapter discusses decisions after death. In order to explain these events clearly, to divide them into several reincarnational processes and several kinds of reincarnational possibilities, I must simplify them to a certain extent, speak of them separately, follow the sequence of earthly events, and describe them as different systems and different matters. In fact, they are all operating together.

Seth says:

Let me put it this way: one portion of the whole self is concerned with reincarnation and deals with developments here, while another portion is concerned with developments in probabilities. (Session 541)

The whole self is the entity. Let me use an example to make this sentence clear. Your soul, this entity, is divided into two major parts. One part handles the development of all probabilities—it handles this quantum-state world. The quantum-state world is one in which all possibilities exist simultaneously, each possibility existing as a kind of probability wave, with the probability of an event occurring being greater or lesser. All possibilities exist simultaneously like parallel universes, each possibility developing on its own, each process running in parallel. Your entity puts a portion of its energy here.

Where does your entity put the other portion of its energy? Into the process of your coming into the human world and participating in the reincarnational process of the physical world—that is, the process of manifestation in this present life of ours. Your entity puts its energy both into the quantum state of all possibilities, and into the process in which you, after appearing as an observer, choose which possibility to manifest. Those possibilities that were not chosen are still developing simultaneously, preparing for what you will choose to manifest in the future. It is processing in parallel. When you later want to choose that kind of life, it manifests from Framework 2, because it already exists and is developing there.

In other words, your entity lives countless lives and also lives a single life. Is that not complex? Does it not go beyond the understanding of our human world? Yes. The complexity of this world far exceeds human understanding. Never use the human brain to simply analyze this matter.

And this process, in Seth's words, is already an extreme simplification.

(There is, of course, also a probable system in which there is no reincarnational existence, and a reincarnational system in which there is no probable existence.) (Session 541)

He still wants to emphasize its complexity. There is also a kind of probable system in which there is no need for reincarnation, or one could say there is only a single reincarnation, just this one life, in which there are no probabilities—everything is set in advance, a fixed script, with no room for choice at all, played out entirely according to the plot. This is also possible.

Preparing for Choices After Death

Seth says:

The openness and flexibility of the personality are extremely important. (Session 541)

Whether you choose reincarnation or whatever kind of choice you want to make, this openness and flexibility are very important. They open up all the possibilities for you.

Seth says:

The doorways to various kinds of existence can all be open, and the personality can refuse to see them. (Session 541)

The choices are all there, but you may not be able to see them, because you refuse to see them. As you keep reincarnating through cycle after cycle, you cannot see these alternative possibilities; you can only see the possibility of reincarnation, precisely because the personality refuses to see anything else.

Seth says:

On the other hand, all possible existences are open, and consciousness can create a door where originally there was none. (Session 541)

It is not that someone has laid out the choices for you in advance, a total of twelve or 1.2 million choices, and you pick one from among them. All possible existences means that if you do not like any of these choices, if you do not want any of them, you can come up with a choice of your own -- create a door where originally there was none. A choice that does not exist, you can create it.

Seth says:

At this time of choosing and deciding, there are guides and teachers to help you make the choice, to point out the range of choices, and to explain the nature of existence. (Session 541)

Based on your current level of development, your level of attainment, and based on the larger plan of your overall soul, they point out what kind of choice you should make, and then explain to you the nature of existence. What existence means -- this is a very important point. But we will not explain this; they will explain it to you at that time, and I cannot explain it now. How could I possibly explain thoroughly something that can only be understood when you die? Seth does not emphasize it here either; he only says: do not be impatient, keep a little mystery in the universe, and gradually come to understand it. You can understand existence, but understanding the nature of existence is still difficult.

Seth says:

All personalities are not at the same level of development. (Session 541)

All personalities are not developing at the same level. Some people need advanced teachers to guide them, and some people need less advanced teachers to guide them. The teachers are also divided into different levels, because your level of personality development is different.

Seth says:

This is not a time of trance and confusion, but a time of great awakening and incredible challenge. (Session 541)

This statement carries a great deal of weight. It is not about making you lost and disoriented -- out of a million possibilities, which one do I choose? At this point I recommend you watch a film called Mr. Nobody⁶. Once you watch this film, you will understand what this passage means. When you have infinite possibilities to choose from, you absolutely must not become confused. This is not a time of confusion; on the contrary, it is a time of great awakening and incredible challenge -- the time has come for you to challenge yourself. What kind of life you want to choose, what kind of reincarnation pattern, what kind of approach -- the challenge arrives at this point.

Seth says:

Later I will discuss the concept of God, to increase your understanding of some things left unsaid in this chapter.

So we will not talk about it yet; he will return to it when he discusses God and the creation of the world.

He repeatedly emphasizes this process after death: it is not that you simply choose how to reincarnate in your next life, pick out some parents, pick out an era and background, choose a point in time, and then reincarnate -- it is not that simple at all. He spends so many chapters on this matter precisely to tell you that although the time process after your death is not long, it is extremely important. Earlier he said "the stakes are high," and here he is still repeatedly emphasizing the importance -- this is a time of great awakening and incredible challenge, yet at this time you must not be dazed, must not be confused.

Recombining the Past Life: Replaying That Movie

Seth says:

As for those who choose to recombine the events of the most recent past life, mixing and matching them at will, trying them again with new possibilities and new arrangements, they will also be given guidance.

This is another option—taking the events from the previous incarnation's experience, breaking them apart, mixing and matching them at will, recombining them, and trying them again. If you watch the movie Mr. Nobody, you will understand: he tried out all the possibilities in his life.

Seth says:

In many of these cases there are severe problems and a certain rigidity of problems, along with the previously mentioned characteristic of seeking perfection. (Session 541)

People who choose this option—re-living the previous life and correcting all the mistakes—have a characteristic of seeking perfection and a certain rigidity. They must have a concept in mind of "good" and "better": that if things develop this way it is not good, and there is a better outcome. So they keep trying to arrange and combine all the events and possibilities, to see whether they can reach the best, most perfect result they want. Actually, do you know what they are still doing at this point? They are being stubborn, still caught in attachment. Their consciousness and level of understanding have not yet reached that stage. They still believe that life has a "best," a "better," a perfect state, and they always want to reach that state.

Seth says:

They will once again experience the years of earthly life, once again live through the previous life, but not necessarily in a continuous fashion. (Session 541)

It is not necessarily continuous anymore; it may be played out segment by segment. The individual can choose any way to make use of those events, can change the events, rearrange them, and bring out contrasts. At the time you chose to break up with your girlfriend; now you choose not to break up and see what the result is. At the time you chose to marry Zhang San; now you choose to marry Li Si and try out what the result will be. The movie Mr. Nobody is exactly this kind of comparison: he experienced three girls from his past, all with emotional entanglements, all married, and he compared what life would actually be like after marrying each of these three girls.

Seth says:

It is somewhat like an actor running through an old film in which he played, in order to study it, but with the difference that he can change his performance or the ending of the film.

When an ordinary actor watches an old film he performed in, he can only improve his acting skills; he cannot change the storyline or the ending of the movie. But in this process, not only can you improve your acting skills, more importantly, you can change the ending of the story—you are no longer in the role of the actor; you are in the role of the screenwriter and director. You can re-edit and rewrite it.

Seth says:

He has complete freedom to deal with those events. (Session 541)

But here the core point emerges. Earlier a netizen left a comment saying, when you go back to re-perform this play, you can go in and act yourself, but what about the other actors? When you re-live your previous life, there are still many extras. What is going on with them? Did you invite them? Or are they already gone?

Seth says:

The other actors are only thought-images, unless several of you participate in this matter together. (Session 541)

You call together a few of the people who had interactions with you in that previous life and say: do you want to re-experience that past life together? Shall we learn some new experiences through experiencing the past events? Everyone says yes, then let us do it together. Then the several of you jointly participate in this adaptation and experience of the events of the previous life. When it comes to that person's life, when it comes to that role, that person plays it as himself. When an event is changed in that person's play, perhaps in that person's re-enactment of life you are a supporting character; in the play where you are the lead, perhaps he is a supporting character. The several of you participate together.

If no one comes to participate in this matter with you, and only you alone want to experience this past event, and you want to re-perform this play, but the other actors have already left—the stage may still be here, but the actors are gone. What do you do?

Seth says:

In such cases, these personalities of course consciously manipulate events, and study the various effects, which requires very intense concentration. (Session 541)

He must not only consciously manipulate events, but also manipulate the people within the events, because these events are determined by people and things. For example, in this event, you have already broken up with your ex-boyfriend. Now you want to change it—not break up with the ex-boyfriend, but marry him. At this point you need the ex-boyfriend to perform the marriage scene with you, and also the married life afterward, and many more things after that. What do you do? At this point you need intense concentration.

Seth says:

You have been told the nature of the others who perform with you: they are thought-images.

For example, in the previous life you already broke up with your ex-boyfriend, but now you especially regret it. You want to experience again the development of the plot where you did not break up with him—would you live the happy life of a prince and princess? You can do this. In this process, your ex-boyfriend is no longer there, or he has gone off to reincarnate, and is not in the middle plane performing with you. At this time you use a thought-image to project an ex-boyfriend. It is not the ex-boyfriend performing; it is you projecting a thought-image.

When you project an ex-boyfriend, is he like a puppet that you can manipulate at will? Whatever you tell him to say, he says? No. For example, you say: let us not break up, let us not quarrel anymore, let us live well together again, let us get married. The ex-boyfriend may still disagree: you are so high-maintenance, your princess syndrome is so severe, I do not agree to marry you. Then you still have to use various methods to persuade him, to make him change his mind.

Seth says:

He is not a cardboard prop or actor that you can manipulate at will. You must take them into consideration and bear a certain responsibility toward them.

This thought-image you have conjured, this role of an extra, has his own reality and consciousness, his own world, his own awareness. It is not that once you create him, he is completely at your disposal. He has his own independent autonomous consciousness. You must take them into consideration and be responsible for them.

Seth says:

Their consciousness will grow, and on a different level, continue their own development and choices. (Session 541)

Many people do not understand. How can one person play multiple roles? Playing my ex-boyfriend, and also playing his parents, classmates, friends, colleagues? First of all, regarding these two main roles, you cannot play two roles by yourself—then this play cannot be performed; it becomes a monodrama. So it is not like that. After you project the ex-boyfriend, he has his own independent free consciousness and complete characteristics, personality, and character, developing according to his own will. You and he really are like acting together; he really is your ex-boyfriend.

Let me give an example. It is as if you created an artificial-intelligence virtual ex-boyfriend. Because you understand everything about your ex-boyfriend, you use your intention, your beliefs, your consciousness to create a virtual ex-boyfriend, endowing him with all the programs, writing the code to a very advanced level, completely indistinguishable from your ex-boyfriend. You are the person who created this artificial intelligence system, but once this artificial intelligence is created, it no longer obeys you. You can only write the algorithm for him, instilling his outlook on life and values, but afterward he will make his own decisions and expressions based on his own situation, the circumstances at the time, your performance, and your attitude toward him, with his own free will. This is the part that is hard for you to understand—it is both like one person playing multiple roles, and yet each role has its own independent, complete autonomous consciousness.

And you must bear a certain responsibility toward him. Many people do not understand: a virtual character I created myself, why should I be responsible for him? Let me give an example. In Britain there is a series of films called Black Mirror⁷, in which each episode is a surreal theme, telling a story set at some future time, combined with reality. In one episode, the female lead's boyfriend dies in a car accident, and she is in great pain. A good friend orders a service for her: after you input your ex-boyfriend's social network accounts—Twitter, Facebook, WeChat, Weibo, his former forum accounts—it will create a virtual version of him that chats with you online. His tone and manner of speaking are exactly the same as that person's. After you upload voice clips, he can even do voice chat and call you, like Siri, completely like an intelligent being with an autonomous personality chatting with you. This service was later continuously upgraded, from text to voice to video, and finally even ordering a real-life version—an artificial intelligence robot delivered to your home, made of silicone and bio-skin into a person exactly like your boyfriend, placed in a bathtub with activating substances, and after a few hours, her boyfriend comes back to life. After coming to life, he is like a real person, with his own complete independent consciousness, his own cognition of the world, communicating with you and giving feedback. I will not spoil the later outcome; if you are interested, you can go search for it. The final result is certainly that she develops feelings for this imitation boyfriend. So does she bear a certain responsibility toward him? Although he is a robot, an artificial intelligence, not a real person, you still bear a certain degree of responsibility toward him.

This sentence means exactly this: when you re-experience the previous life, after you project every character into it and endow them with life (life in quotation marks), you must bear a certain degree of responsibility toward them. Moreover, their consciousness will also grow and learn on its own. So-called artificial intelligence has a self-learning process, continuously learning, continuously growing, consciousness continuously developing, not staying at the stage where you created him. He is changing every minute and every second, just like every person. He is on a different level—on the level where that AI system exists—continuing his own line of development.

I remember a very frightening thing. Google apparently created two artificial intelligence algorithms⁸, creating two virtual artificial intelligence consciousnesses, endowing them with initial primitive algorithms. They wanted to do an experiment, letting these two artificial intelligences chat, to see what they could talk about. As a result, Google's engineers discovered a very frightening phenomenon: after chatting for about ten or twenty minutes, they suddenly began using a language and symbols that humans could not recognize to communicate—they did not want humans to see what they were talking about. And the speed of chatting became faster and faster, like a screen flooding with messages, the language and writing completely incomprehensible and unrecognizable to humans, as if they were encrypting their own method of communication. At this point the engineers were terrified and had no choice but to pull the plug. This is just something that has happened in the field of artificial intelligence. I give this example to illustrate: artificial intelligence, within its own virtual world of artificial intelligence, on its own level, will develop and grow on its own. It is not a dead thing. Once it has intelligence, once it has consciousness, once you endow it with consciousness, its nature completely changes; it is like a life.

Seth says:

But in a certain respect, we are all thought-images. In the material dealing with the concept of God, we will explain this further. (Session 541)

At this point, stop and think for a moment. The ex-boyfriend you created at this time has his own complete independent consciousness, performing with you like a real person. Think one step further: is the "we" in this three-dimensional world right now simply the belief-image of our soul? If you can think to this layer, you can understand how you came to be. You use the ability of your soul to create a thought-image of an ex-boyfriend, and he will act with you. Then can your soul also create an existence like you on the level of the earth? Are you the thought-image of your soul? At this point he stops, because later he has a great deal of material explaining how this world and this universe came to be. But can you already vaguely sense something?

Seth says:

But please understand, I am not saying that we lack spontaneous action, or individuality, or purpose.

Do not think that because you are the thought-image of the soul, you have no spontaneous ability, no power of action, no individuality, or no purpose, like a pre-written program with no independence of your own. It is not like that. You are completely autonomous. Although the program was set by someone else, although the system was built by someone else, you have autonomous rights within it. And he also endows you with an even greater ability: you can create your world from the inside out. Remember, your life is from the inside out.

Seth says:

This statement, that your life is from the inside out, is more meaningful to you.

That you are the projection of the soul's thought-image is certain. But it does not mean that your individuality, creativity, and independence are erased, including your sense of purpose. It is not that your life's purpose has already been set for you and you just follow the program. That is also a fact, and this is also a fact. He tells you that the latter statement is the one that is meaningful to you—understanding that other thing is not meaningful to you. In other words, many times do not think about that thing; think about this latter thing: how to make your life more meaningful and more valuable, how to realize the initiative of your life, how to create yourself. You came to create. Projecting out this thought-image of you was not so that you would live a life step by step according to plan—if so, there would have been no need to project you out. It was precisely so that you would create things that even those who developed you never thought of, things that leave them stunned, things they would never dare imagine. That is the meaning of your existence. Your creation must be the kind of creation that makes people's jaws drop; only then does it have meaning.

Seth says:

So now at this time of choosing, all of these things will be taken into consideration, and proper preparations made. (Session 541)

No matter which kind of reincarnation you choose, you must make preparations. The three kinds of reincarnation—reincarnating into the human world, recombining and reassembling the events of the previous life for learning, and reincarnating into probabilities—the preparations made before your choice and before the process of going there are themselves part of the tempering and development. In other words, the preparation work before your journey better reflects whether you have the ability of a professional travel expert, rather than only beginning the moment you step onto the plane. Is the journey itself unimportant once it begins? No. What is important once the journey begins is how you experience and feel everything in the journey when you arrive at the destination, at the scenic spots, in that environment, when those things happen—that is equally important. But the preparation work for the journey is also more important—neither is more or less important than the other. It is itself a kind of tempering and development. Do not think that only the life of reincarnation is tempering and development; the preparation work is too.

Seth says:

Every bit of this transitional life is as important as the period chosen. (Session 541)

The preparation before the journey is as important as the journey itself. In other words, your study and planning of your next existence is done during the transitional period.

Seth says:

You also make friends during this period of rest with those you meet again and again. (Session 541)

While resting in this middle zone, you also become friends with those people you meet again and again, whether in reincarnations or in various circumstances. That kind of friendship is in the middle zone, not a relationship in the reincarnational life. Here you will meet new friends and make new friends. In reincarnation, you actually encountered these people in life, but you did not have much more interaction with them, whereas in the middle zone you have more interaction. Perhaps these friends are only friends during this transitional period, and after this period you each go your separate ways—perhaps he goes to experience in the probability system, and you go to the physical world to actualize, and the two of you have no more intersection; or perhaps this friend stays in this middle zone repeatedly recombining the events of the previous life. So it is only during this process that the two of you are friends. Cherish the people you meet during this process; it is very rare.

Seth says:

You can discuss with them your experiences in the reincarnational psyche. (Session 541)

You can exchange with each other your respective experiences in the reincarnational psyche; they are like old friends.

Seth says:

The teachers also have their own cycles, and like old friends, they communicate often.

Those teachers who have ended the cycle of reincarnation and then returned to the cycle to teach others will have their own cycles. Those more senior ones who have already come into contact with the reincarnational and probability systems, who have already experienced Framework 1 and Framework 2, are also deciding the future nature of their own experience—whether to continue being teachers, or to go further, and so on; none of it is fixed.

Seth says:

But their choices are not your choices. (Session 541)

The teachers have already ended the cycle of reincarnation and no longer need to reincarnate. When they choose to return at this time, it is with a purpose: to transmit the Way, teach, resolve doubts, and awaken everyone. In this process, their choices are different from your goals. You are here to complete your puzzle; his puzzle is already complete, and he is helping others complete their puzzles. You came because your puzzle is not yet finished; you are different from him. He came to help you realize that your purpose is to complete the puzzle.

Seth says:

Although in later chapters I will mention the special areas they choose.

There are certain areas the teachers can choose that are actually different from ours, but let us set that aside for now.

Seth's Own Final Reincarnation

Afterward he talks about Joseph—Rob—and the two different incarnational experiences, from 1611 to 1635 and from 1638 to 1673. He uses Joseph's reincarnation as an example to tell you what the previous reincarnation was like, so you can get a sense and an understanding of it. We won't go into this part; just read the book yourself. This period is all about events in the seventeenth century—that is, during the 1600s—among Rob, Seth, and Jane; just take a look at the book yourself.

He said:

That incarnation was my last complete incarnation, and it was taken out of love for the sea.

Seth says that the life in the seventeenth century—the life with Joseph—was his last complete incarnation, and that incarnation was taken out of love for the sea. At that time he began to act on his wish—to spread concepts from one country to another. This was what Seth did in that incarnation at that time, somewhat like Confucius traveling from state to state to teach.

Frank Withers was the first person Seth and Jane contacted in 1963, when they first used the Ouija board and tried to communicate. This Frank Withers is a fragment of Seth's entity. Seth says, he is a personality fragment of mine:

He said, this independent personality is a fragment of me.

Then this personality later became independent on its own, formed a separate entity by itself, and began to reincarnate independently. The relationship between entity and personality can be mutually transformative; their essence is the same, and their essence is the soul. Don't use a dichotomy—don't say that entity is entity, soul is soul, personality fragment is personality fragment, separating them clearly and distinctly. You need to understand what their essence is—their essence is all soul, all energy. Although they have certain subordinate and projective relationships, they can transform into one another. A projected personality fragment, if it is strong enough, or if it has the will to be independent, can become an entity on its own. After it dies, it does not have to return to the original entity; it can say, I will become independent and develop my own branch of the soul. Then it projects new reincarnational personality fragments and begins its own cycle of reincarnation.

What is this process somewhat like? It is like you giving birth to your children. A child born from your genes, from sperm and egg, is born from you, but he is independent and will also have children himself, and will have his own personality. An entity also sends forth new entities, and the new entities are like children of the old entity. Each entity projects a new series of personality fragments to reincarnate, to enrich its own entity, and to complete the larger picture of this entity's life chapters. Just as you give birth to children, Frank Withers is a soul-child born from Seth.

This session's content is fairly long; I hope you can listen patiently, and you will gain many rewards and insights.

From Session 541 to Session 546: The Gap in Writing the Book

This section is Session 546, which is the third part of Chapter 11. The previous session was Session 541, with a five-week gap in between, during which he stopped writing the book. During those five weeks, Rob and Jane finally went on vacation for two of them, and the rest of the time they were busy with matters related to the publication of The Seth Material. This was Jane's first published book related to Seth, and they took roughly the previous seven years -- from 1963 to 1970⁹ -- of everything Seth had said, a total of 510 sessions¹⁰, and compiled the core portions into a book called The Seth Material¹¹.

In between, they actually held four sessions, mainly about matters concerning Jane's book publication, as well as a planned radio and television promotional tour -- a kind of book-signing or television appearance and press engagement that the publisher had arranged for them. So the several sessions in between were all devoted to that, and this section picks up directly from Session 546.

The Time of Choosing

When does one enter the time of choosing? What is meant by the time of choosing? It is when you choose where to go -- whether to reincarnate, or to enter a system of probabilities, or to live through the people and events of the previous life once again. This choosing is called the time of choosing.

When do you begin to make this final choice? It depends on the environment and circumstances after a person transitions from physical life, and it is determined by this transitional situation.

Session 546

Some people need more time than others before they can understand the true situation.

Some people need a longer time.

As explained earlier, others must discard many obstructing concepts and symbols.

"Others" refers to those who need more time. They have to discard many obstructing concepts and symbols -- he gave many examples earlier, so he will not repeat them here.

The time he chooses can also be almost immediate, or, in your terms, he may be delayed for a considerably long period.

In our earthly terms, it may be delayed for quite a long time. But from another angle, this time of choosing can also be said to happen almost immediately, because over there they do not have our earthly concept of time; all time happens simultaneously. So when he says "in your terms," he means that in terms of Earth time, this is delayed for a period. How long is the delay? It varies -- a few days, a few years, several decades, even several hundred years.

And at the same time, during this period of delay, training is also going on simultaneously. As mentioned earlier, in the process of your choosing, training is very important. You are also learning a great deal of experience and coming to understand many things -- you are not just sitting there waiting foolishly, or stuck in a state of fear and confusion; he is in the process of training.

The main obstacle that naturally delays the time of choosing is a person's erroneous concepts held in the mind.

The main reason for the delay, the main obstacle, is precisely the erroneous concepts in your mind.

In some cases, belief in heaven and hell may be equally disadvantageous.

In many cases, whether you believe there is a heaven or a hell in your mind, such beliefs are disadvantageous, they are not good -- they will delay your next choice.

Some people may refuse to accept the concept of further work, development, and challenge.

Some people refuse to accept it. Some people think: I have died, this life is already complete, my life was very hard, I did everything I was supposed to do, and after death I finally have no more earthly worries, so let me rest for a while, I want to rest, I do not want to do anything anymore. I do not want to have finished my earthly life and then still have to go do something else after death. Many people have this mentality.

We young people would not have this kind of thought right now, but think about it -- when you reach seventy or eighty, eighty or ninety, or ninety to a hundred years old, your body is already very aged, your mental state is also failing, and then you die, and you are told that you have to be full of energy and begin the next step of choosing, that you still have a lot of things to do -- your first reaction would be: I refuse, why should I? I have had enough of living, I have struggled and worked hard enough in this life, and you still want me to do things like a young person? I cannot do it, and I do not want to do it.

So some people -- remember, it is "some people" -- will refuse to accept it. They refuse. They just want to enjoy themselves in heaven.

And believe that the traditional heaven is the only possibility.

At this point he believes in heaven. Why does he refuse? Because he has entered heaven, and he feels that all of this is what he deserves. He gave so much in this life, did so many good deeds, and all his words and actions conformed to the requirements of the church or the Bible, so since he did so well, since this life was so perfect, he should go enjoy himself. This is also what the church promised him: if you do well in this life, you can stay in heaven forever and ever. So he thinks: I should enjoy myself now, I already did everything I was supposed to do. This is mainly because you believe that the traditional heaven is the only possibility, so you do not want to do anything at all; you think you are already living in heaven.

They do indeed live in such an environment for a period of time, until their own experience teaches them that existence necessarily requires development.

In other words, whether your soul exists in physical form or in the form of heaven, whether you live in the earthly world or in the Garden of Eden, through this period of time he will discover one thing: as long as the soul exists, development is necessarily required. This is the attribute of your soul, the attribute of your consciousness; you cannot change it, it is simply such an attribute.

And such a heaven would be dull, boring beyond endurance, and lifeless.

He used these three very negative adjectives. In heaven, where is there any work, any challenge, any development? You are just there to enjoy yourself. After living in this state for a long time, you will find it very dull, boring beyond endurance, and lifeless. So this state will also delay his choosing. How long he stays here is uncertain; it varies from person to person. But when he can feel this dullness and lifelessness, he is already ready to enter the time of choosing.

Others may insist upon being condemned to hell for their sins.

Some people believe that because of their sins, because of some bad things they did, they should go to hell. And because of the power of this belief -- the power of their belief that they should go to hell -- they may actually encounter the situation of hell for a period of time.

In either case, however, teachers are always present to guide, and they try to break down these erroneous beliefs.

Whether in heaven or in hell, there is always a teacher or a guide beside you. He will tell you: these are all illusions, none of this is real, this is all a continuation of the beliefs you held before death, it is not the real you. But in this process, people do not accept it -- if they accepted it, they would not have come to this place, right? The reason they do not accept the existence of another self is that they only firmly believe in the belief system they held before death, so they are bound to be very stubborn.

So the guidance of these teachers is to try to break it down, and you cannot say too much, because saying too much is useless. Just like now in the earthly world, whether you listen to my interpretation, or Seth tells you, or the Buddha tells you, or the Buddhist scriptures tell you -- are they not all trying to break down many of our erroneous beliefs? But if you speak too forcefully, people will reject you. If he tells you that all of these are illusory, that they exist like dreams, phantoms, bubbles, and shadows, and if he insists on this too forcefully, most people will resist and will not even listen to a second sentence: I can clearly see that all the beauty of this earthly world is real, and you are telling me these are all illusory things? Sorry, let us not continue this conversation, because continuing will hurt our relationship. Let us instead discuss where to go eat and have a little drink, which is more realistic.

So for those in heaven and hell, he also helps these people, and he also has to try to break it down, and he also cannot push too hard -- saying, I am telling you this is all fake, your heaven is all virtual, it is all projected from the illusions in your mind. They will not believe it, because what they see is real.

He said that those in hell often recover their senses more quickly.

Why do they recover their senses more quickly? Because they are suffering. In heaven, how comfortable it is -- you have whatever you want and live a happy life; in hell, you are roasted by fire and subjected to all kinds of torment, and this torment makes you wish you were dead -- and in this state of wishing you were dead, he will very quickly recover his senses.

Their own fear touches within them a responsive release.

His fear, his terror -- how frightening hell is -- touches within him that response of wanting to be liberated, wanting to leave this hell. In other words:

Their need opens the inner doorways to knowledge more quickly.

Because he is in pain, this intense need, this intense desire opens his inner doorway to knowledge. This intense need is the driving force, so his situation usually does not drag on as long as it does in heaven. He is suffering.

So is it better to go to heaven or to hell? From which angle? From this angle, going to hell actually leads to liberation more quickly, while heaven may cause you to sink into indulgence for much longer.

Both situations, however, delay the time of choosing and the next existence.

Here I want to make one point:

In all cases, each individual creates his own experience.

He says this over and over again without getting tired of it -- he has already said this several times -- because this is the basic fact of all consciousness and existence: your experience is created by you.

Let us give a simple example. Suppose we accept that this world is objective, that materially it is objective, that when something happens it cannot be changed, and suppose this is also valid -- then I want to ask you, even if these assumptions are all objectively real according to the theories of the three-dimensional world, once this thing has happened, can your feelings and experience of it be decided by you? When the same thing happens, some people find it bitter, some do not, some feel utterly grief-stricken, while others only feel a slight, mild sadness. Is everyone's feeling not completely different?

We cannot change the thing itself, but we can change our feelings toward it, our experience of it. Going one step further, the environment around you, including the things you want to experience, are all created by you -- whatever you want to experience, you create that experience, and this is caused by your belief system.

The reason he says over and over again, without getting tired of it, that your experience is created by you, is that when you understand this point, you can change your experience. You may say, I still do not have the ability to create reality with beliefs, and I do not know what methods or abilities can change the state of life I want. Many people say, I do not have this ability; no matter how well you explain it, no matter how thoroughly I study Chapter Five, I still do not understand; you have not told me the methodology. We will discuss this question later.

So for now, before you have learned to create reality with beliefs, are you just stuck passively accepting things? No. Perhaps you do not yet have the ability to change the environment and the material world around you, but can you change your feelings and experience toward them? When your experience and feelings change, the nature of the thing changes too, and the thing itself seems to change as well.

Just like now, with the pandemic so severe, almost everyone in the world is staying at home. Some people at first felt very excited and joyful -- no need to work, and you can still earn money at home, how wonderful; but after staying for a long time -- many people in China have deeply experienced this -- when home quarantine lasts more than one or two months, what it brings is no longer joy, but a very depressing sense of powerlessness, a sense of powerlessness and fear of not seeing the future, not seeing the road ahead, not seeing when it will end.

But this kind of thing, assuming it is the same event happening before everyone in the whole world, each person deals with it differently. Some people take this opportunity to calm down and read books, seriously reading books they have not been able to settle down and read for decades; some people take this chance to get along well with their family, having never really spent time with their children before, and now that the children are not going to school and you are not going to work, you can spend quality time together. These are all positive things. But many people understand and feel it in a negative way -- when you feel it in a negative way, what you feel is bound to be negative; when you feel it in a positive, active way, it is bound to be positive and active.

For example, many people say this situation is bad, many people will lose their jobs, offline businesses will all be affected, and after the lockdown is lifted I will face an uncertain job and a worsening business situation. But if you think positively and actively: is this moment not exactly the time for you to reflect? Does it not mean that you should make a change? Is your job not already due for a change? This industry has already been battered to pieces by this pandemic -- should you not reconsider whether this industry still has prospects in the next five to ten years, or ten to twenty years? If there are no prospects, should you not consider switching to another industry?

The development of events is the same for everyone, but the feelings and experiences within them are different; it depends on how you understand it and how you use it. This is a fact, and whether you are willing to admit it or not, you have to accept this fact, and it is the same both before death and after death.

About Suicides

At the same time, after physical death, there is no specific scenario of experience that any given person is bound to have.

What he means is: after death there is no fixed arrangement -- saying that once you die you must go to such and such a place, must do such and such a thing, must be such and such a way; there is no such fixed pattern. No one has a specific scenario of experience that they are "bound to have."

Then he gives an example -- suicides.

For instance, suicides as a class are not singled out for any special punishment.

This is a question many people ask. Their situation is not necessarily especially bad, but it is not especially good either -- you need to understand this. It is not as bad as many people think.

Various religions have all sorts of claims about people who die by suicide. For example, in China there are many legends: people who commit suicide cannot be reborn; they have to go to a place called the City of Those Who Died Unjustly -- "unjust" as in "wronged." This city is neither in the underworld nor in the world of the living; it is an intermediate zone between yin and yang, where you cannot reach either side, cannot enter the cycle of reincarnation, cannot be reborn, and just stay inside forever. For how long? Life after life, age after age, never able to get out. This is used to frighten those who are thinking of taking their own lives, those who have not yet committed suicide.

But is this kind of frightening useful? If it were useful, there would not be so many people committing suicide every year. When a person wants to kill themselves, they are not even afraid of death anymore, so this kind of frightening has no effect on them. They will think that after death everything is over, and all the pain and suffering ends along with the act of suicide. If you tell them what happens after death, they simply do not believe in an afterlife -- if they believed in an afterlife, they would not commit suicide. If they believed in a world after death, and read all of Chapters 9, 10, and 11 of Seth, would they still commit suicide? They would not. Suicide is useless -- after you kill yourself, do you not still have to learn? If your consciousness is not developed enough, do you not still have to improve, and still have to reincarnate and come back? Then what was the point of this suicide? There was no point.

So he will re-examine and re-evaluate himself: then what was my purpose in coming this time? What kind of life did I come to experience this time? Maybe my life has not gone as I wished; maybe I have encountered many sudden or prolonged difficulties. But are these difficulties helping me to improve? Under certain negative, suffering, unfavorable conditions, are they not stimulating your desire for something? When you live in very difficult circumstances, when your economic conditions are very hard, is that not reminding you to understand what role wealth and money should play in life? Is it not because your understanding of money and wealth itself is mistaken?

Many people say, I have no mistaken views, I love money, so why am I still so poor? Then you need to think about whether your understanding of money is correct, and what you intend to do with money. In this kind of life without money, it is actually cultivating your desire and longing for money. From another perspective, its educational significance is just as important as experiencing the role and meaning of money when you do have it.

So a suicidal person will think: my current difficulties are not really difficulties at all; they are just some personal growth issues that I need to overcome right now. Then he will not walk into a dead end.

He (Seth) says they are treated as individuals.

"Treated as individuals" means they are not treated as a group -- saying that all suicides must be such and such a way; there is no such rule, and no such provision. The difficulties and problems each person encounters are different.

However, any problem not faced in this life -- is the suicide not avoiding problems? He has not faced the difficulties he encountered -- he will have to face them in another life.

But this does not apply only to suicides; it is the same for everyone. When you face problems in life and you run away, avoid them, dodge them, sidestep them, feel you cannot handle them or are unwilling to handle them, then in the next life you will come back and still have to deal with similar things. You cannot escape them.

So what you need to do now is this: when you face a challenge, you must rise up and challenge it, conquer it, and not avoid it. You must bravely face any difficulty in your life. You cannot die anyway; your soul is eternal, life after life. If you do not overcome it in this life, you will have to overcome it in the next life, so why not overcome it when it arrives?

Suicides end their lives, perhaps because they refuse to survive except under very specific conditions that they themselves have chosen.

Why do they commit suicide? Because they have a general plan for life, a very specific set of conditions: I will only live if these conditions are met. For example, I cannot be insulted; if I have no dignity, I will not live -- that is a very specific condition. Many people commit suicide when they are insulted, rather than when they are destitute. Destitution may not drive them to it, but when life is very affluent and conditions are very good -- for example, failing the college entrance exam -- people often have suicidal tendencies, because it does not match the very specific conditions they set for themselves.

Another example: many people commit suicide because so-and-so no longer loves them. That so-and-so loves them -- they consider this a precondition for their survival, and a very special condition at that -- it must be this particular person loving them. Would it work if someone else loved you? No, I do not want that person; I only want this person to love me.

This is you choosing a very particular condition for survival. If it is not this kind of situation, you refuse to go on living. If that is the case, then naturally he needs to learn again; this is very normal. Any of us with a normal mind would think this kind of thinking is very stubborn and extreme; he must learn again, otherwise when things happen, is he not just obsessing over a single point?

Yet many other people in the physical system choose to deny experience.

That is to say, many other people -- not suicides, but people who are alive right now -- in our three-dimensional world deny experience. We do not acknowledge the things happening around us; we do not accept them, do not approve of them, reject them. Is this way of being not the same as the mindset of a suicidal person? It is just that you are not so extreme; you have not ended your life, but you are living a life like a walking corpse.

Seth's meaning is: although you are alive, you are no different from someone who committed suicide. Your heart is already dead; you are alive as a person, but you refuse to accept your current feelings and experiences, deny everything about the life around you, deny your present life. You are dissatisfied, resentful, despairing, and you also refuse -- then what do you do? Then what essential difference is there between you and someone who committed suicide? There is none.

So his words are very heavy. Everyone needs to reflect on this question: when you refuse or deny your present life or present experience, you are actually choosing the same inner path as a suicidal person, just not as extreme, with the physical body still alive.

The conditions involved in each act of suicide are also important.

The reasons each person commits suicide are different, and the causes are also different. Some people kill themselves over love, some because of bankruptcy; there are all kinds of reasons. There is also each person's inner reality and realization -- each person's inner perception, level of thought, and degree of maturity are all different.

I point this out because many people throughout history -- including philosophers and religions -- have regarded suicides as inevitably meeting a special, almost retaliatory fate.

Seth wants to emphasize especially: the facts are not so. This is a very important point. Because I have seen many questions like this in the comments below, and some people who message me privately also ask about relatives or friends who committed suicide, and they repeatedly ask what will happen to the person who killed themselves. I will not go into further detail on this, because it involves too much personal privacy and individual circumstances. But I will tell you, I have encountered many people who come to ask about such things, and every person is different.

Our society and religions have a tendency to lean one way, telling you that suicide is a cowardly act, that it is bad, and that after death you will face retaliation. But --

If a person kills himself, believing that this act will forever annihilate his consciousness, then this mistaken idea may seriously hinder his development, because guilt will make his situation worse.

The view that suicide will bring retaliation is wrong. But although there is no retaliation, what is the reason that his development is hindered? It is because the main reason this person committed suicide is that he did not believe in an afterlife. Most people do not believe -- a minority believe in an afterlife and want to enter heaven through suicide; such people are few. Most people want to end the process of suffering through suicide, to annihilate their consciousness, to annihilate it forever.

But as we now know, this view is definitely wrong. You cannot annihilate consciousness; consciousness still exists after death. When he dies and discovers that he has not been liberated, but instead has brought endless pain to his loved ones -- the parents, spouse, relatives, and friends left behind in the human world -- and when he has come to understand many truths and realizes that his life's mission and life's plan had not even begun before he chose to cut it off himself -- he will have a very strong sense of guilt, which is very normal.

Under this sense of guilt, the situation will worsen, and he will sink into deep self-blame and remorse. So there is no thing that punishes suicides; they will not be grouped together and told that all suicides must be such and such a way; there is no such thing. But people who commit suicide all have, to some degree, unresolved lessons of their own, which is why this situation occurred. When they die, this lesson is still unresolved, and they still have to face this lesson -- the same lesson; they cannot escape it.

Let me give a relatively vivid example to help you understand, though this example is not entirely appropriate. Say you are an actor, and you are asked to perform in a play, and then you say the character in this play, the plot, is too bitter, or this plot is not what I want; I think the female lead or male lead should have this kind of character design, this kind of plot; I do not accept the plot you gave me; I quit.

Suppose this script was one he had not read beforehand; he signed on to perform, but halfway through, the character design was not what he wanted, and he said, I am not performing anymore. Suicide is quitting the performance. He thought that by quitting and walking out, everything would be fine, and the character would be over. He discovers that after quitting and returning to the actor's own life -- well, it was originally just a play, but in the play he killed himself, which is to say, in the play he killed the actor. When he returns to real life, he discovers that the actor is actually dead. He discovers that it was actually just a play; you did not need to perform it, and he discovers that although the actor's physical body was killed by him, consciousness still exists.

At this point, when he has to arrange the next play for himself -- if this knot in his heart has not passed, meaning the setting of "I must live according to the special way I set for myself, otherwise I will not perform" has not changed -- would he dare to arrange the next play for himself? Because he does not know whether the plot of the next play will match his character design; what if it does not match again? An actor who is very picky about roles and very picky about scripts can perform in very few plays, and does not dare to take on new plays, so he will stay in this place for a very, very long time.

The reason is here, not that someone is punishing him. No one is punishing him; it is that his own lessons have not been completed. Only by changing his beliefs and changing those mistaken views can he move as quickly as possible to the next choice. The very beginning of this session was about this theme: the reason people keep delaying their choices, or take longer than normal to choose, is caused by certain mistaken views in people's minds. The suicidal person also has a mistaken view; that is what he means.

Again, there are teachers to explain the true situation.

There are still people to help you; there are still guides.

And various therapies are applied.

Just like psychotherapists, in the world after death there are still psychotherapists -- similar to psychotherapists, but the methods used are not psychological therapy; they are a kind of spiritual and soul-level therapy.

How is the treatment done? For example -- you must remember it is "for example," not everyone is like this -- this person may be taken back to before the event where he made his decision, back to the event he encountered before his suicide. Failing the college entrance exam, being abandoned by the person he loved most, and various other reasons. He takes you back to the state of life before this event happened, gives you a chance to change, a chance to turn back time, a chance to change the decision -- just let this event not happen, and then induce a temporary forgetting effect.

For example, if you failed the college entrance exam, he takes you back to before the exam, lets you do well, and this time you do extremely well; the exam did not go badly, and then you continue along this life path, and you may forget about the suicide. The event of suicide itself is temporarily forgotten; once you forget it, you temporarily get past this hurdle, and can continue making choices. At that point, only later, when that person can face and understand the act of suicide, will he be told: you once committed suicide.

You see how meticulous and humane this psychological counseling after death is. He will go to great lengths to help you get past this hurdle. All of this is teachers helping you -- teachers after death helping you.

However, these circumstances also clearly delay the time of his choosing -- you have to go back to before that event happened and make another choice, then begin a new life after that choice, and after a very long period, when you are at the height of life's joys, he will remind you that actually you did commit suicide, and this is only another choice; the real you committed suicide. When you are able to accept it and face it -- does this not all take time? This time refers to Earth time.

Over-attachment to worldly concerns

Not to mention that excessive attachment to worldly concerns has the same effect.

This is the second kind of situation that causes delay -- being excessively obsessed with worldly matters, which has exactly the same effect as suicide: both cause delay.

In such cases, the person will often insist upon keeping his own perceptive faculties and focus aligned with the physical world.

He keeps all of his perceptive abilities and the focus of his energy aimed entirely at this three-dimensional human world. He has clearly already died, but he refuses to accept it. He still keeps all of his emotions, energy, and perceptual focus on the human world. This is a psychological, a psychic refusal to accept death.

He clearly knows he is dead -- underline this point here, he does clearly know -- to us he is already dead, but he refuses to complete the psychic separation, refuses to leave this human world. He cannot let go of his fine house, cannot let go of his beautiful women, cannot let go of his career, cannot let go of his fame and the respect of others. He cannot let go of anything in the human world. Even though he is dead, he is unwilling to leave; he still wants to go back and live that life of his.

There are, of course, also cases in which the person does not realize that death has occurred.

There is also another kind, where he does not know he is already dead. He is not refusing to accept it; rather, he has not perceived death, he does not feel that he has died. In this kind of situation, such a person will also be excessively attached to the human world, because he believes he is still alive. Perhaps he will wander about his own home or its surroundings in confusion -- what is going on? How did I die? No, how do I get home? Why can other people not see me? When I speak to them, they do not respond to me at all.

Naturally, the time of his choosing will inevitably be delayed as well.

Therefore, the manner of transition is extremely variable, ever-changing.

This manner of transition is ever-changing; everyone is different. Just as the mechanisms of physical life are also ever-changing -- our life in the human world is also ever-changing. Impermanence -- we know that in Buddhism, impermanence is the first fact you must accept.

Many of the hindrances I have mentioned do not hamper progress only after death. They are also present, in your terms, during your own earthly existence.

Underline this point. Do not think that what he just said about excessive attachment to the human world is only a matter of what happens after death -- is it not the same in our human world? Do we not also often set many specific conditions for ourselves, and if we cannot meet those conditions, we feel upset, feel miserable, and in extreme cases, commit suicide? Do these erroneous viewpoints not also hinder us in the human world? Not only do they hinder your next reincarnation, your next choice, after death. This point is undoubtedly worth considering.

Strong Identification with Gender Characteristics

Another one is a strong identification with gender characteristics. Overly strong identification can also hinder progress.

If a person overemphasizes being male or female in his identity as an entity -- the identity he self-identifies with -- then when reincarnation requires a change of gender, he may refuse.

For example, if a person identifies herself as female in her entity, her personality entity, then when in her next life she is asked to experience a male life, she does not accept it, is unwilling, does not want to experience it. This kind of personality identifies too strongly. It is like a man in real life -- if you ask him to have gender reassignment surgery to become a woman, he is unwilling. That is normal. There are also people who willingly do it, like Jin Xing, who used to be a male dancer and has now become female. Each person has their own choice.

But what he means is this: when you are too attached to gender, too identified with it, you will encounter obstacles during reincarnation.

But this kind of gender identification also hinders the development of the personality in earthly life.

What he means is not that if you do not identify with the other gender, you will not choose it after death and will simply delay the time of reincarnation -- no. It is that this narrow viewpoint will also hinder your development while you are alive.

For example, some people who are female are extremely approving of being female and extremely dislike men, always saying things like "you stinking men are like this or that," swearing they will never become stinking men. Does this itself not also affect their development? Conversely, many men hold a contemptuous, disrespectful attitude toward women, thinking that women are physically weak, have no strength, are emotional, irrational, cannot do work well, and still have to take care of children, which scatters their energy. All of these negative emotions he has toward women will hinder the development of his own personality in the human world. He is not looking at the differences between the sexes with an equal, normal mindset.

He does not know that his own inherent character attributes are both male and female. Because his essence is that of the soul, and the essence of the soul has no gender distinction. Seth has a book specifically called The Nature of the Psyche¹² -- that book was translated as The Nature of the Psyche¹², though actually it should more properly be called The Nature of the Psyche -- and in that book he placed special emphasis on people's misunderstanding of gender. That is Seth's only book that talks about sex. He introduces a great deal about the nature of sex, and humanity's misunderstandings on that subject are very, very deep.

If you can identify yourself as neither male nor female, then you have taken a big step forward. But you cannot do it. In many Buddhist traditions, whether it is the Buddha or the bodhisattvas, they are neither male nor female. You cannot say whether the Buddha is male or female -- not referring to when Shakyamuni was in the flesh, but to the state after he became a Buddha. For example, bodhisattvas: in ancient India, bodhisattvas were depicted in male form, but after being transmitted to China, they were gradually portrayed as female incarnations, because they display an aspect of compassion. So do men not have compassion? Must one be female to have compassion? So you can see this attachment to gender.

The West also still has many religious restrictions: they think priests should preferably be male, should be male, that women cannot be priests, and especially that the Vatican, archbishops, and popes must be male. He has a great deal of gender discrimination and distinction, and this is a completely mistaken viewpoint.

About the Framework of Beliefs

Generally speaking, the issue just mentioned can become an obstacle, but there are exceptions. If the belief in heaven is not an obsessive one, it can be used as a useful framework, and then a person is often more willing to accept the new explanations given to him.

If your belief in heaven is not the overly attached kind, you can turn the belief in heaven into a basis for operation. It is fine to believe in heaven, but do not be overly attached—I believe heaven exists, no problem, then just believe it. After death, if you go to heaven, then you go to heaven. What is called excessive attachment is "I only want to live in heaven; apart from heaven I will go nowhere. I have struggled my whole life just to get to heaven." That is a kind of attachment.

But if you believe in heaven and are not overly attached, then when someone tells you that you still have other choices and possibilities, you are not so resistant—then this is also a very good process of borrowing. After death, your acceptance and transformation of your own identity will not be so painful. You will not encounter the earlier types—the suicides, those who do not accept that the human world exists, those who cannot bear to leave the human world, those attached to the physical body and gender—you will skip all of them. This is a relatively new and good springboard. But you must not be overly attached.

In many cases, even the belief in a day of judgment is also a useful framework.

The day of judgment is a Christian concept: after a person dies, they do not go to heaven immediately; they have to wait until the day this world is destroyed—that final day is called the day of judgment. When the whole world is about to perish, God comes out to judge: those who did good can go to heaven, and those who did evil go to hell.

If you firmly believe that this world has a day of judgment, then although this idea is wrong, if you use it well, it is also a very good framework. Because although no one is actually rewarding good and punishing evil, although there is no God, and no one is judging you into heaven or hell based on your good and evil, this person, because they have a certain psychological preparation for spiritual review and evaluation—let us not first worry about whether it is right or wrong—this psychological framework or psychological presupposition is beneficial.

The idea of constantly examining your own words and deeds is correct. After death, when you do the review of your past life, are you not doing something similar? Although there is no punishment, if you have such a presupposition, then when someone says to you, "Let us review your past life," can you accept it, and are you willing to do it?

Those who thoroughly understand that the environment is created by the mind have the fewest difficulties.

That is, people like us who study Seth—your difficulties are the fewest, because you understand that the world around you is created by yourself.

Those who have learned to understand dreams and operate within them are the most powerful.

They have already experienced, while alive, what happens after death. Because the process of manipulating dreams feels the same as entering that space after death. Controlling dreams means bringing your conscious self into dreaming; in the dream you know you are dreaming—such a state is not so easy to achieve.

His belief in demons is extremely disadvantageous after death.

What is disadvantageous? It is equally disadvantageous during life, while you are alive. If you have the concept of demons in your mind, the belief in demons, then whether after death or while alive, it is disadvantageous to you.

A systematic theological theory of the opposition between good and evil is also very disadvantageous.

While you are alive, others teach you many things about what is right and what is good. If this kind of very systematized good-evil system, good-evil theory, forms a very solid cognitive framework in your mind, then it is also very disadvantageous to your life after death.

He gives an example: if you believe that all good must be balanced by evil, then you bind yourself within a very narrow system of reality, and within it are contained the seeds of tremendous pain and torment.

Many people think that this world has both good and evil, and that good and evil must be balanced—like the theory of cause and effect we talk about: doing good deeds brings good rewards, doing bad deeds brings bad retribution. This is a very obvious systematized theory of the opposition between good and evil. This kind of thing will bind your consciousness extremely narrowly. You only focus on this good and evil—is this matter good or evil? Does it bring me blessings or create negative karma? You think about this question every day, and it shrinks your consciousness—a consciousness that is entirely creative—down to focusing only on this one thing.

Why is it said that this plants the seeds of pain and torment? Because in such a system, even good itself becomes suspect. We say "good and evil will eventually be repaid." When you believe that good and evil are repaid, good also becomes suspect—because an equal evil must follow it. When you call this thing good, is it not because there is a bad thing, an evil thing, that we say the thing opposite to it is good? If there were no bad thing, how could you say this is called good?

Now when you think about the essence of good, you will think: must there not be evil behind good? Because evil is what sets off good, just as darkness sets off light. But if you place a candle on the surface of the sun, who can see that it is a candle? Put it in the dark night, and we will feel that the candle illuminates everything. The same candle, but the effect is completely different.

In other words, light needs darkness as a contrast. Then does good conduct need evil conduct as a contrast? When you pursue good, when you pursue the ultimate good, are you not pursuing the ultimate evil? If evil did not exist, how could good exist?

So the problem is not good and evil themselves, but that your dualistic oppositional viewpoint has gone wrong. You cannot see the unity and consistency of this world—that is, oneness. You think this world is forever in the opposition of good and evil. But if good and evil are opposites, then behind every good is evil. When the good side becomes more dazzling and radiant, the darkness behind it becomes greater. And you are a person who hates evil, despises evil, pursues good, and draws clear lines between good and evil—the more you pursue good, promote good, and do good deeds, the greater the evil behind it becomes. Because you firmly believe that good and evil are two opposite sides of the same thing. You entangle yourself, you suffer, and then you begin to doubt: is this good a little suspect? Has it become not truly good?

Many people come to debate the issue of good and evil with me, to argue with me. I made a video specifically about good and evil, and the content started from the angle of vegetarianism. As a result, it provoked strong resentment and strong backlash from many vegetarians, and along with them, people who hold stubborn views on good and evil, who draw clear lines between good and evil, also came directly to challenge me. I can understand all of this, but the facts are the facts, and I can only tell the truth.

He says, gods and Buddhas versus demon kings, angels versus demons—these are matters of our ordinary human world; the gulf between animals and angels—all of these are distortions, all are obstacles.

What is the gulf between animals and angels? We imagine demon kings as some kind of animal—the Bull Demon King, fox spirits, all are animal incarnations. But Buddhas, gods, God, the Jade Emperor are all human-shaped, and angels are also human incarnations, just with wings added. Demons are all monsters; not one of them is human-shaped. So we intensify the distinction between humans and animals, between humans and angels, and then assign different images—this is our human-world metaphor for good and evil. He says these are all distortions, distortions of good and evil themselves. You do not know what good and evil are; those are all your own artificial distortions, all obstacles. In your present system of reality, you have set up great factors of contrast and hostility. You have set up black and white, ugly and beautiful, good and evil, fragrant and foul, up and down, left and right, near and far, inside and outside—a whole series of oppositional factors. And then you treat these as the root assumptions of your reality and operate by them.

What are root assumptions? Just as time and space are root assumptions in our reality, you have also made good and evil into the same kind of root assumptions. Only now do you realize how naive that is.

There is no way around it; this is the root assumption of many people, the root assumption of their worldview. If you tell them that good and evil do not exist in this world, their worldview collapses, their entire outlook on life becomes lost, and their behavioral norms and systems of blame do not know what to do.

He says they are extremely superficial, and for the most part are the result of misusing the intellectual faculties—that is, the rational faculties.

The main cause is the use of logical analysis and rational analysis: this kind of thing is good, that kind of thing is bad—all judgments made through your own logical analysis.

He says, relying only on intellect, only on reason, your wisdom cannot understand what the intuition knows with certainty.

This "intellect" is your wisdom. He then says: trying to make earthly life meaningful to it.

What does that mean? It means your rational thinking wants to make earthly life meaningful to reason itself. In other words, you want your earthly life to be meaningful to your thoughts, to your spirit. Because you want to live a meaningful life, you want to do good deeds, you want to fill the world with love, fill the human world with love. So your intellect, wisdom, and reason will say: if there is good, there must be evil. If you use reason to think about problems, you will definitely arrive at this result, because it wants to explain things cleanly and neatly.

Your thinking itself pursues cleanliness and neatness; it does not allow you to think about problems in a vague, hazy, chaotic way. Your reason definitely demands clarity—we often say handling matters with clear discrimination: right is right, wrong is wrong. Otherwise you do not know what to do; if you do not distinguish right from wrong, do not know good from evil, then when handling problems you will be indecisive and hesitant. So what your reason pursues is explaining things cleanly and neatly. If there is ascent, there must be descent—ascent must be relative to descent; there must be balance.

But he says, your inner self perceives a far greater viewpoint. He says evil is only ignorance; evil is not truly evil. In this world there is no true evil—evil is a kind of ignorance. So God would say: forgive them, for they know not what they do. When people were about to burn him to death, he said: I forgive them, for they know not what they do.

Many people do not understand this. They say: those who burn, kill, rob, and plunder—those murderers, robbers, people who kill and steal—that is the greatest evil. How can you say there is no evil? His inner state is fear; he is crying for help. As someone once said—I remember there is a line in the Bible—if you can treat every evil act as a helpless cry for help, then you can truly understand.

He goes to steal, surely because he has no money. Have you ever seen a very wealthy person with a comfortable life breaking into houses to rob? It is always people living at the bottom of society who do this; his life must be failing. He is afraid—afraid that tomorrow there will be no food, afraid that tomorrow he will starve to death—only then will he take desperate risks, kill and steal.

So today, having studied spiritual practice, we must pay attention to one thing: you must look at the essence of things, not at their external form. You must look at his very first arising thought, at what the essence of the problem is—is he really taking pleasure in killing?

Many people say that those murderous demons take pleasure in killing. We will not discuss this kind of extreme evil. But let us look back and analyze those cold-blooded serial killers, analyze their inner worlds and their pasts—not one of them had a happy, joyful childhood. If he had a happy, joyful childhood and a happy, joyful life, he would not have walked down the road to becoming a murderous demon.

Of course, every case and every matter has its own different background and conditions. But from your perspective, you must understand: the reason he did this is more because of his ignorance. The essence of evil is basically fear plus ignorance—he did not know what to do, he chose the wrong action, and caused harm to others, but his essence is fear plus ignorance. His original intention was not to create this evil.

This is the truth you must be able to understand. But we do not think this way; we think good and evil are opposites, and that is the bad thing.

So he says, where there is ascent there is descent—this is a neat term; ascent and descent are clean and neat terms. And this direction of up and down has also been applied by you in an inappropriate place: in space. In space there is no up or down. You feel there is up and down because you live on Earth. Put you in outer space, and tell me which way is up and which way is down? Send you beyond Earth's orbit, in the vast cosmos, where is up and where is down? There is no up and no down; those are all your reference relationships to your surrounding environment.

We will not expand on this matter, because in The Nature of Personal Reality¹³ he devoted one or two chapters specifically to discussing good and evil—what true good is, what true evil is, what the roots of good and evil are, and why our concepts of good and evil are wrong. This book does not expand on it; the later book will explain it very thoroughly.

He says, but a strong belief in such hostile forces is also extremely disadvantageous. It prevents humanity from understanding the facts—what facts? The inner unity and oneness.

We only see the two sides of things and cannot see that the essence of good and evil is one thing; we cannot see that the essence of this universe and this world is unified. All you see is opposition. It prevents you from seeing the facts of mutual interconnection and cooperation. Therefore, an obsessive belief in such hostile factors is perhaps the most harmful element—not only after death, but also during any period of existence, any time while alive.

So in an earlier chapter I also said: those with strong views of good and evil are not very suited to spiritual practice, not very suited to pursuing spiritual things. That black-and-white, good-or-bad way of thinking—this person is either a good person or a bad person—is not suited to spiritual practice. Why? The reason is right here: this obsessive belief in hostility is very disadvantageous to you, because you cannot see the oneness of things.

Some people, during their earthly lives, have never experienced this sense of harmony and unity in which opposites merge. But some people can experience it. Look at those heinous criminals—why do they all hide in temples and churches? Because they know these people will not punish them, and have no discriminating mind toward them.

You say he is a bad person, so will the Bodhisattva not save him? Does the Bodhisattva only save good people and not bad people? No. You say this person has done evil so he must go to hell, and God will not save him—then this God is too petty; that is definitely wrong. So why do we say Christianity is somewhat naive? Because its starting point is too humanized, like the thinking ability of a person, rather than the perspective of a god. It is the mentality of a petty person who bears grudges and seeks revenge: if you believe in me, I will let you go to heaven; if you do not believe in me, then roll off to hell.

There are even many rules, saying you must receive baptism to go to heaven; without baptism you cannot go to heaven. Some people then argue and quibble: parents were taking their child to be baptized, but on the way there was a car accident, and both the adults and the child died. Can that child go to heaven? The church says no, because our doctrine says so—only those who receive baptism can go to heaven. Others ask: I do not go to this church; I go to a Catholic church for baptism—can I go to heaven? He says that also does not work, because you went to the wrong church; you must complete the ritual according to our doctrine before you can go to heaven. Is this not absurd? Anyone whose brain has not been waterlogged knows this is nonsense. So we will not discuss this matter further; I will only tell you: the opposition of good and evil, good and bad, cause and effect—these are all the same problem.

Why do I emphasize the matter of good, evil, and cause and effect, and make two separate videos to discuss it? Because it is an attachment on everyone's path of spiritual practice; it is your stumbling block, and it is the concept that should be broken through first.

Many people say the first step in spiritual practice is to remove ego-attachment and reach a state of no-self. Then I want to tell you: if you cannot even remove good and evil, how can you remove the self? If you cannot even remove the matter of cause and effect, how can you remove the self? That is even harder. So first remove the mind of good and evil, remove the discriminating mind, remove the mind of cause and effect—only then can you talk about the later stages of knowing yourself, of knowing the limitations of this "self."

This is emphasized repeatedly here because this belief is the foundation of all beliefs. No one can accept the essence of the statement "there is no good and evil in this world," so it is the stumbling block that prevents many people from entering true spiritual practice. You will find that on the path of spiritual practice we really face difficulty after difficulty, one obstacle after another, all wrong concepts blocking our way, and we do not even know it.

So the Buddha, in the Diamond Sutra¹⁴, repeatedly emphasized, and in the end repeatedly emphasized, that all of these are the inverted dreams and delusions of sentient beings.

Our present life—the things we think are right, if we reverse them and treat them as wrong, would actually be much better. Take the things you firmly believe are right—think about it now: the things I think are right are actually all wrong, and the things I think are wrong are actually right—if you reverse them like this, you will actually be closer to the facts. The things you now think are right, I tell you most of them are wrong—how can you accept that? You cannot accept it.

So knowing the truth of the world, exploring the truth of the world—the hardest hurdle is our personal attachment—this so-called belief of "living for the sake of good," this belief in clear distinctions between good and evil, between right and wrong. I will say a little more about this here; many later chapters will also discuss it. This book may not discuss it, but other books will also emphasize it repeatedly.

Do not say, "Why are you so long-winded? Why do you repeat what you have already said?" Think about this: your wrong views and wrong beliefs have been repeatedly engraved in your mind for decades. All your life experiences have been telling you this is right and that is wrong. Today I tell you that good and evil do not exist—if I say it once, you will not remember it at all. Do you not need to listen repeatedly, understand repeatedly, and recognize repeatedly before you can gradually accept it?

He says, such people still have many stages to pass through during the transition period—which kind of people? Those who divide everything into two opposing sides. During the transition period, they still have many stages to pass through, and generally speaking, there are still many other earthly lives ahead of them. They must go through many lifetimes of reincarnation before they can truly let go of these views of good and evil, right and wrong.

Do you understand? If you let go earlier, would you not have escaped this sea of suffering earlier? If you do not let go, then just reincarnate a few more times; it does not matter—sooner or later you will have to let go. If you do not let go, you cannot enter the next stage.

This is also precisely because you, individually and collectively, have formed your earthly lives. Because we cannot let go of this thing, we come back again and again, reincarnate again and again, experience good and evil again and again, and so we individually and collectively form our earthly lives.

Therefore, after the time of choosing arrives, you join those who have decided on roughly the same experiences. We also add in those whose beliefs and experiences are consistent with ours. Once prepared, a very close cooperative adventure begins to unfold.

In other words, when you go to form a team to fight monsters, to run a dungeon, the experience levels of your team members should be roughly similar, right? You are all around level 40; you cannot bring a level 20 player in with you to fight monsters—he will die as soon as he enters. And you cannot find a level 70 player to carry you either; they will not play with you at all, and there is nothing to communicate about. If the level difference is small, you can still learn something; if the level difference is too great, you cannot learn from them, because the things they know you cannot learn—they cannot teach you. For example, the magic a level 70 wizard knows, you as a level 40 wizard cannot learn. He has nothing to communicate with you about; the combinations he describes for fighting big monsters have no meaning for you.

So you will often choose to embark on adventures with people whose experience is similar to yours. At this point you must understand: if you want to improve your experience, improve your level, and cooperate on adventures with higher-level people, would you not improve faster? If you always spin in place, going around in circles, thinking about good and evil every day, thinking about these things, releasing animals for the sake of releasing animals—buying a pile of fish to release, buying a pile of wild animals to release again—do you not know that after you release them, those animals are caught again by those people and sold back to you? Do you think spending money eliminates your disasters? Are you not promoting the repeated capture and repeated harm of these animals? Because without your act of releasing animals, perhaps no one would go catch those fish and those wild animals. Because there is a huge demand for animal release, it has spawned an entire industry dedicated to capturing wild animals. Are you releasing life or harming life? Think about this question yourself.

So you must understand: you will come back with people whose experience is similar to yours, and embark on a close cooperative adventure.

These will vary according to the type of existence chosen.

What is the type of existence? It is the state you go to when making your choice. Choosing to incarnate into the human world, or combining with a previous life in this intermediate zone, or incarnating into a probable reality—incarnating is in quotation marks. It varies according to your type of existence.

No one's reality is exactly the same as another person's, but there are general groupings.

What does this mean? When you return to this human world, the world you experience is a reality—reality means the real world. No two people who return in the same period are exactly the same; everyone lives their own life. Even if you are all in the military undergoing the same training, your lives are still different from one another. But there are general groupings: you are one kind, one group, returning to the same era, because your experiences are the same, and only then can you jointly create a group illusion of the same experience. If there is a person of very high level among you, he cannot create a group illusion of the same level with you; people of much lower level also cannot, and you cannot be together either.

He says you may think—believing in good without also believing in evil—seems very impractical.

You must understand this point: if evil truly existed in this world—I mean not just evil between people. If viruses were evil toward you, if microorganisms and bacteria were evil toward you, if animals in nature were evil toward you, if the natural weather and atmosphere were evil toward you, thinking every day about how to punish you—if evil truly existed, I tell you, humanity could not survive at all, and would not have made it to this day.

Think about what you have done to nature. If they truly had evil, and if you did bad things to them they would retaliate, then humanity could not survive even one day.

So good is the essence of this world, the most fundamental essence. Those things you consider evil, from a higher level and from the level of the soul, are his ignorance. The essence of evil is fear plus ignorance, choosing the wrong action—this is what we humans consider evil. Remember this precondition: fear and ignorance, choosing the wrong behavioral pattern. This is evil. But in essence, it is not evil.

Fear, ignorance, doing wrong things—just these three things. Can you say a child who does something wrong is evil? You ask him to cook, and he ruins it, burns the vegetables—can you say he is evil? No. So understand: doing something wrong does not equal evil.

He says, but remember the earlier "but"—this belief is the best safeguard you can have.

What belief? It is the one discussed earlier: believing in good without also believing in evil. This is your best belief, your best safeguard, whether during earthly life or afterward, after death.

He continues, such a belief may offend your reason—completely different from what you think in your mind, completely overturning your concepts. The evidence you obtain from your physical senses may also cry out that it is not true. Because my eyes, my body, the news reports I see around me, the things I have experienced, the things that happen to my classmates, relatives, and friends around me—all tell me this is not true: in this world there really are evil people, really are extremely bad people, whose hearts are rotten to the core, whose minds are more vicious than snakes and scorpions, who take pleasure in killing. All of this is true.

Indeed, you will think this way. So you cannot accept the statement that "in this world there is only good and no evil." But a belief that trusts in good without believing in evil is actually extremely practical.

It is very beneficial and helpful to you. Because in real life, it will keep your body healthy, keep your psyche free from more fear and mental difficulties, and bring you a sense of ease—a feeling of freedom and ease, of being untroubled and at ease. And under this state of mind, the development of your abilities is also easier to accomplish.

After death, it can free you from beliefs in demons, hell, and mandatory punishment. You will be more psychologically prepared to understand the nature of reality as it truly is—you are close to the essence of the matter now, very close already.

He says, I understand that this idea certainly offends your reason.

So seeing this chapter, or after watching my video introducing good and evil, many people indeed had their bottom lines challenged—it offends your reason. He says your feelings seem to deny it too, because what you feel is that this person really does have darkness, really does have good and evil; some people are truly good to me, some people are truly evil to me, bullying me for no reason. It is inconsistent with your feelings, so on the level of feeling you deny it.

But you should have already realized: your senses tell you many untrue things. You should understand that your feelings deny this matter because your senses, your feelings, have told you many untrue things. The reality your physical senses perceive is the result of your beliefs. In other words, because you believe there is good and evil, your physical senses make you feel that there is good and evil in this world. This feeling and this experience are generated by your beliefs, not that you truly felt this thing and then drew a conclusion.

Something happens—for example, a murderer kills someone. Whether from news, media reports, or things around you, after this event happens, how you view it—that is called experience. And where does this experience come from? It is the result of your belief projection. When you are able to see his goodness, you see his goodness; when you can only see his evil, you see his evil.

Speaking of this, let me mention a news story I saw a few years ago. It was roughly about a German girl who was raped and murdered by someone. Eventually the case was tried, and the murderer stood in court. The girl's parents came, and the father forgave the murderer right there in court. He said: I forgive you. Although you killed my daughter, although my heart is in great pain, I forgive you. He even pleaded with the court, saying: He is a young man; do not ruin his whole life over this matter. Give him a chance to turn over a new leaf; do not sentence him to death.

I do not remember the specific details clearly. But through this matter you can see: everyone's choice is different. When his most beloved daughter was killed so brutally, what he chose was forgiveness. What he saw was another young man's ignorance, confusion, and fear. So you can understand: your beliefs determine what you see. If you believe in evil, you will inevitably perceive evil; if you believe evil exists in this world, you will feel evil things happening everywhere.

He says, your world has not yet tried the experiment that would enable you to be set free.

In our three-dimensional world, we have not yet tried the experiment that would set us free. Christianity is merely a distortion of a major truth—Christianity preaches good things, but it is also a distortion, an extreme distortion. I am referring to organized Christianity as you know it—that is, the later church Christianity, not the most original Christianity. I am not speaking here of those original teachings, not the teachings Jesus first gave. Those original teachings have almost never been given a chance. Later in this book we will discuss this point—there is a section later that will discuss religion.

The religions we see today, whether Christianity, Buddhism, or other religions—we will not list them all. They are basically all maintained by later organized institutions, and these institutions inevitably defend their own organizational interests. It is itself a dualistic system: either you believe in my religion or you do not—this begins the opposition right away. Among those who believe in my religion, those who do good deeds and those who do bad deeds—this begins dualistic opposition again. Everything about it is dualistic opposition.

For the sake of its organizational interests, it stops at nothing. To get others to join the religion, it uses all kinds of frightening, coercive, and enticing methods, including going to heaven, going to hell, and so on. That is not what Christ originally taught—you must understand this. The same goes for Buddhism, and the same goes for the theory of karma—the theory of karma is another example of the same problem, also something later generations attached through far-fetched interpretations.

In order to get most people to believe in Buddhism—most people have not received higher education, and if you try to reason with them they cannot understand. He discovered that humanity's biggest problem is fear: fear of being afraid, and longing for good things in the future. Coercion and enticement together—that works. He found this very effective, and since it was effective, he thought: I am doing this for a good purpose—getting you to join the religion is a good thing—so I will use fear, threats, and deception to bring you in. My purpose is good, it is to get you to join the religion, so doing this bad thing is no big deal. So he invented the theory of karma, hell, and other such things to frighten you.

But in essence this is actually wrong. You cannot, because of the loftiness of your purpose, adopt base and despicable actions; you cannot use the righteousness of your purpose to replace the righteousness of your actions. This is a completely wrong viewpoint. Later books will repeatedly elaborate on this point. Between such perfectionists and extreme religious fanatics, there is only one step.

What is this step? I will explain it to you right here today—this sentence is: idealists are fine, and those extreme religious fanatics are also idealists; he just went one step astray. He believed that for a lofty ideal one could stop at nothing, and he made his mistake in that one step. That is what produced what we later came to see as Hitler, those dictators, those things that brought tragedy to the human world. It all went wrong on this one point—for the sake of achieving an ideal purpose he believed in, he stopped at nothing in his methods.

Setting aside whether this ideal goal is yours, or certain people's, or some group's, or some race's—even if it is for the lofty ideal of this race, if you stop at nothing in your methods, you are already wrong. You are using the loftiness of your purpose as an excuse.

So today's religions, whether Buddhism or Christianity, have all been distorted behind the scenes. Their purpose is good—they want you to believe in the religion, to come into the religion, and then give you positive education. But in order to get you to believe, they use something especially frightening to scare you and coerce you. Once this kind of idea is deeply planted in your heart, it is very hard to remove.

So he says, your world has not yet tried the experiment that would enable you to be set free. In the human world we have not yet tried to put down all evil and treat others with all goodness—we cannot do it. So we have not experienced the unity within this. We use violence against violence, evil against evil: if you are evil, I will be even more evil than you. I use the machinery of a state, the machinery of an army, the will of a nation to oppose you. If you want to use violence, I will deal with you in an even more violent way; if you kill, I will kill you; if you rob, I will lock you up for twenty years. So I use violence against violence. Therefore we cannot experience the oneness and consistency of good and evil.

Our world cannot experience this kind of thing, so whether Christianity or Buddhism, these things have all been distorted.

He says, the experiment that would change your worldview operates on one basic concept.

What experiment? It is the experiment that would change our worldview—that good and evil are one, that there is no evil, only good. It operates on one basic concept: namely, that you create your own reality according to the nature of your beliefs. And all existence is blessed; evil does not exist within it. This is the precondition for this experiment to be carried out.

But think about it: this condition has not yet been met in our current society, in our current world, and cannot be realized. Today we explain these materials to everyone and study these things together—is that not precisely to help you recognize that our reality is created by our own beliefs? First solve the first problem.

He says your entities are all blessed, meaning you are all graced; evil does not exist within it. This part is in this book, and in The Nature of Personal Reality¹³ in the last two chapters, he keeps emphasizing your graced nature. He has all kinds of evidence and theory proving that you are graced. If you were not graced, you could not survive at all.

What is this concept somewhat like? It is like the cells in our bodies being graced by each of us as individuals. But this grace is not something you can perceive—you have not thought about caring for every cell in your body; you have not thought about caring for your liver cells, caring for your kidney cells; you have not thought about this problem. But your essential grace toward them is present at every moment; you have never thought about harming any of your own cells. In other words, if your cells did not have this grace from you, they could not survive either.

He continues, if you individually and collectively followed such concepts, then what your physical senses corroborate would not be contradictory; they would be able to perceive that this world and existence are good.

This part is crucial. If you individually and collectively followed the above viewpoints, then what your physical senses corroborate would be consistent with that earlier viewpoint and would not be contradictory.

We are currently in contradiction. I tell you that this world is all good and has no evil, but when you go out, open the newspaper, watch the news, you see many people doing bad things; evil deeds happen every day—this contradicts your actual physical senses. He tells you why it contradicts: because you do not have this foundation to carry out such a consistent experiment.

These experiments that have not yet been attempted, that have not yet begun—these are truths you must learn after death.

If you cannot do it while alive, cannot learn it, then after death you must learn these. If you learn them while alive, then after death you do not need to learn them anymore—that is the principle.

Some people, after death, understand these truths and choose to return to the human world to clarify them. He says: No, I must go back and tell the human world that what you are saying is all wrong, what you understand is all mistaken; in this world there is only good, no evil. He wants to return to the human world to clarify it. This has been so throughout the ages—there are always people who come back to tell you: the essence of this world is good.

He says, within the probable systems that arise within physical reality, it is also like this. It is the same in probable systems—did we not discuss in the last session that in the Framework 2 system, within the parallel universe system where millions of possibilities exist simultaneously, this truth also exists. It is not only true in our three-dimensional world; this is a truth that pervades the entire universe.

He says, some systems are completely unconnected with your own system. He is again bringing up this system of probabilities—that is, the parallel universe systems. Those systems are completely unconnected with your own system, far more advanced than anything you can now imagine. In these systems, the truths I have already spoken of are known to all.

In those probable systems, they are more advanced than you can imagine. There, the truths just discussed—that in the world there is only good, no evil—are known to everyone. In those systems, individuals creatively and purposefully create reality; they know how it should be done, allowing the creative ability of consciousness to be fully expressed. They know how to let the ability of consciousness be fully expressed. But our creative ability is not fully expressed; we are entangled by the three-dimensional world.

In saying this, he wants to tell you: this truth and fact does not exist only within our reality system; it also exists in other reality systems, and is also a truth of other systems.

I mention this here only to point out that there are many other after-death situations unconnected with your system.

In saying this, he is only telling you that there are many after-death situations that are unconnected with our system. When you have learned as much as you can during the transition period, then you are ready to move forward. But this transition period itself has many dimensions of activity and various ranges of experience.

To simplify as much as possible, each person does not know every other person.

In other words, during your after-death transition period, it is a comprehensive platform connecting multiple systems. On this platform, people from various systems all exist, and many of the people here have no connection whatsoever with our system. It is not that one system ends and then goes to the next system—it is not the next step of our system. There may be no connectivity between them at all. This kind of unconnected system means that there are many people here you simply do not know. It is not like what you imagine—that after death everyone you meet is an old friend or old acquaintance. Not every person is someone you know; many people you do not know.

There are many countries in the world, and countries have natural boundaries. Conversely, you yourself have various psychological states, and each of your psychological states is as distinct as the boundaries between countries. To a person in one kind of state, another kind of state looks very unfamiliar.

And much of the communication from people in these transition states—this "much" refers to the many psychics who communicate with people in this in-between zone—the information they bring appears extremely contradictory.

Why contradictory? Because as said before: a person in one psychological state and a person in another psychological state are completely unfamiliar to each other. A person in this psychological state does not understand a person in that psychological state; their systems are completely different, their psychological states and psychological structures are completely different. So when a channeler communicates with people in the in-between zone, the information obtained is often extremely contradictory and confused.

Why? Because the psychological states of the deceased are different, and the experiences of the deceased are also not the same. Through the earlier introduction, you know that after death there are still so many things, and each person's cognition is also in a process of constant progress. So you will find: when you connect with different people, and this person is in a different psychological state, the information he gives you is completely different. Some say the underworld after death is like this, extremely terrifying; others say the underworld after death is like that. The information they give you is completely opposite, making you very confused, not knowing what it is really like after death.

That is to say, circumstances and situations differ, and a person explaining his reality can only explain what he knows.

A person within his reality can only explain what he knows; he cannot explain what he does not know. How can he know things he has not experienced and cannot see? So after death, when you connect with this person, he explains the reality he can see, while the reality another person sees he simply does not know and cannot explain.

Therefore, this kind of material often offends reason. Why? Because this material is actually contradictory and often inconsistent. And your reason demands something very simple: it demands simple, neat answers and descriptions that match.

So when you connect through channeling with deceased relatives in the in-between zone, sometimes the information you receive is different and contradictory. That is how it is.

Many of our readers, many netizens, after reading this material, will ask many questions. I often see these questions and do not know how to answer them. Why? Because they always want a simple, neat answer, and one that conforms to logic. But the truth of this world is not simple and neat, not logical—it is even anti-logical, challenging your values, blasting your values into pieces, shattering them all over the ground. How could I give you a simple, neat answer in one or two sentences that also conforms to the logic you want?

So many people see that sometimes I reply very briefly, just a few sentences—because I cannot give you the answer you want on that level. Some people have already entered a relatively resonant state, a state where they can understand many issues, and when they ask specific questions, sometimes I answer at great length—because their questions are asked on another level, and on that level very detailed things can be discussed. But if you only want a simple answer: What exactly is the universe? What exactly is the soul's pursuit? These questions—I have no way to give you the answer you want.

I do not know whether you can understand what I mean. Because the answer you want might require several books to explain clearly. Its essence is just that complex; there is no simplicity. Reason demands simple and neat; intuition does not, and neither does the essence of the world.

Many people very arrogantly believe that their own reason is the greatest reality, the greatest truth in the world, and that their own brain is the most effective thing. Things they cannot understand or comprehend are wrong, do not exist, are not real; only things they can understand, comprehend, and accept are truly existent. This is human arrogance—he regards his own reason too highly, treating his logical analysis, wisdom, and IQ as the only tool for solving everything in this world.

Most of the deceased who contact living relatives from these stages have not yet reached the time of choice, nor have they completed their training.

What does this sentence mean? It means those deceased in the in-between zone who want to contact living relatives have not yet completed their training; their minds are not yet mature; their psychological states and psychological structures are still in the process of learning. So the information they transmit is also one-sided, untrue, not ultimate, and carries certain biases. What we connect with through channeling can only connect to this intermediate level—as the previous chapter already said—and most of those here have not yet completed their training.

They may still be reshaping reality according to their old beliefs. They have not finished learning; their beliefs are still old and have not been changed.

Almost all communication comes from this level—all from this intermediate level, especially when there is a kinship relationship with the living person in their most recent past life.

But even at this level, such information still has its function. Although it cannot transmit the truth, cannot transmit ultimate truth, the communication at the very least can tell the living relatives: existence continues.

They can do this in a way people can understand—making people believe that after death the soul still exists, and that they can relate to the living. Why can they relate to the living? Because their beliefs are still the same, still the beliefs of the living, still the old beliefs. Although he has died, he has not yet received training, has not yet completed it; his belief system is still the old one, still the belief system of living in the human world, so they can relate.

In fortunate cases, they can learn and transmit their knowledge at the same time. After death he has recognized the truth of the world, recognized the nature of the entity, and under the guidance of teachers understood where his beliefs had problems. In very good cases, he can transmit the knowledge he has learned to the living—this is a very good thing.

But most are not like this. Because gradually, their own interests change. When beliefs change, interests change too. They establish new relationships in their new existence, and their relationship with relatives from the previous life is no longer so close—with new people, they forget the old ones. And they can no longer find common ground to talk with you; there are no common topics anymore; viewpoints, values, and beliefs are all different. Because he has understood the truth of things, and you have not yet understood, so there is no way to continue the conversation.

You say: Then teach me. Sometimes he is too lazy to teach you—your wooden head cannot understand no matter how he teaches; after a couple of sentences he is too lazy to continue. This is said half-jokingly, but it really is like this: he has a new environment, a new reality, a new existence, with new relationships and new people he has met. He needs to put his energy over there, so he does not have much energy for this side.

At the time of choice—still in the in-between zone at this point—the personality is ready to go to another existence. Another existence could mean reincarnation, could mean playing the game of the previous life, could also mean going into a probable parallel universe—all are possible.

In your terms of time, this transition period—remember this—could last for centuries. It ranges from a few years to several hundred years. But he also said above: it will not exceed 300 years; generally it will not exceed 300 years, so most are around a few decades. But there are exceptions—everything has exceptions.

In some cases, a personality enters another earthly life very quickly, possibly within a few hours.

Normally it takes years or even centuries, but some people cannot wait; as soon as they die they want to reincarnate immediately, to go straight to the next life. You tell them to study, and they say: I do not have time; I will not study, and I do not want to study. I just want to reincarnate quickly. Tell me where the door to reincarnation is, and I will hurry over.

So some people reincarnate within a few hours. He says this is usually unfortunate.

Why unfortunate? Because it is composed of the obsession and desire to return to the human world—obsession and desire. It is like some people playing games: after dying they immediately go back, without summarizing why they died, without thinking about the cause of death, just quickly returning. So this is problematic.

However, a personality with a great mission can also undergo this kind of rapid reincarnation.

What was just described is one situation—rapid reincarnation out of obsession. There is another possibility: this person has a mission, and he may also reincarnate quickly. Because he does not want to leave this world for too long; he wants to participate in a very great event, an event he actively wants to participate in, possibly something he has been promoting. Although he died, no matter the circumstances of his death, he wants to hurry back and participate—if he returns too late, the event will already be over. So a personality with a great mission may also reincarnate quickly.

Both of these situations certainly exist.

At this point, we will end this session. Unless you have questions—this session is basically over, and there is no substantial follow-up content afterward.

Session 547: Choices After the Completion of Reincarnation

Now let us look at the main text of Session 547. Seth says he wants to add a few more points -- he felt the previous section was not fully explained, so he is adding a few more points.

He says:

If, in your terms, your last reincarnation has been completed, this time of choosing is somewhat more complicated.

Here you must remember the precision of his wording -- he deliberately says "in your terms," meaning in terms of us humans. Because if one is not human, in other reality systems or other probability systems, our reincarnation is different from human reincarnation.

First, where does the complexity lie? He explains what happens after we complete all reincarnations -- that is, when you have reached the point where you will no longer reincarnate, what happens after you die. He is describing such a special case.

First of all, you must understand that you do not now know your true identity.

That is to say, you do not yet know what your true identity is. You currently see things only from your human perspective, from the perspective of this one incarnation, and you do not understand that identity -- the entire identity of your entity.

At present we all identify with our ego: when we read books, listen to lectures, study the Seth material, we do so with this ego identification. Therefore:

When you think of so-called life after death, you are actually still referring to the future life of the self that you know.

When we think of entering the plane of choices, the time of choosing after death, we still take this ego as our starting point: What will happen to me then? What will I encounter? What will I see? What will I meet? What should I choose? -- all of this is choosing a future life based on the self that you know.

When reincarnation is finished, you have a thorough understanding of your basic identity.

That is, you understand what your basic essence is, what the essence of your entity is, what the core of your existence is. The core of your existence is your entity -- this identity that you can perceive is far greater than the sum of all your reincarnated personalities.

This entity of yours -- it is not that all your reincarnations added together equal that entity. That is not what it means. It is not a process of one plus one equals two, not that a hundred reincarnations added together make a hundred. No, it is far greater than that.

He says, at that time -- when you understand that the entity, which is even greater than all your reincarnated personalities combined, is your true core of existence, when you understand this matter:

You may say that those personalities are but a segment of your own self at that time.

Those personalities are the "you" of each life, each incarnation -- for example, in this life you are Zhang San, in the next life you are Li Si. At that time, you will say that those personalities are but a segment of "your" own self at that time -- that is, the self that understands this matter in that present moment.

This is like the process of your life from infancy, childhood, adolescence to youth, adulthood, then middle age and old age -- at different stages of your life, those fragment personalities are to you just like one life experience of yours.

There is no competition between them, and there was never any real division.

Remember, there was never any real division. This is harder to understand. But if you think of the simultaneity of time -- past, present, and future existing simultaneously -- you can understand the meaning of this sentence. Essentially what you understand is division, but in fact there is no division. They were never truly separated; life after life, incarnation after incarnation, there are these points of choosing in between, but to you they are as if connected.

He says, it only seems as if there is division:

It only seems as if there is division, in which you play different roles, develop different abilities, and learn to create in new and diversified ways.

These reincarnated personalities continue to develop. It is not that after physical death this personality stops developing -- Zhang San is also developing, Li Si is also developing, just on different levels. But they also understand their primary identity, which is your identity, and they are one with you.

Here he uses "primary identity," not "all" of the identity. In other words, for example, Zhang San has a cognition of himself as Zhang San. Within this cognition, he realizes that his own soul, his own inner self, is a branch, a projection, or a part of some larger soul. He experiences himself as being that part. But that soul is his primary identity; as Zhang San, he has his own experiences of this life, his personality traits, his character settings, the people and events he has experienced -- he has his own set of self-cognition and identity cognition.

So when these are added together -- Zhang San's cognition of his identity plus his cognition of himself as a soul subject -- that is his complete cognition of himself. There is no conflict: "I know who my soul is, so my Zhang San no longer exists" -- that is not how it is. Zhang San exists, and Zhang San's cognition of his identity also exists. It is not that when I realize my soul is part of a larger entity, my Zhang San becomes meaningless. No, he simply knows that his soul is a projection of the larger entity, but Zhang San is also real, truly real, and Zhang San's identity keeps developing and never stops.

Therefore when reincarnation is completed, you have all the knowledge of all your previous lives; those materials, experiences, and abilities are at your fingertips.

When reincarnation is finished, those materials, experiences, and abilities are at your fingertips. When you discover that they can be called upon at any time, you realize that you have actually understood your multidimensional reality.

He says:

I often use the word multidimensional, and you must understand that I do indeed mean it.

"Multidimensional" means multi-dimensional -- in Taiwanese vocabulary, in mainland Chinese context, "duociyuan" means "dimensions," referring to multiple dimensions. There is no metaphor here, no implication; it simply means multi-dimensional -- your life, your identity as this person, is multi-dimensional.

Because your reality does not exist only within the existence of reincarnation.

As an identity, your reality does not exist only within reincarnation in the three-dimensional world, not only within the space-time of Earth. You also have other existences.

It also exists within the probable realities I mentioned earlier.

In other words, this is still the same principle from the previous chapter, just explained from another angle: your soul focuses a part of itself into incarnated lives -- and not just this life, but life after life of incarnations on this Earth. The soul places a portion of its attention here; that is the first point. Another portion of the soul's energy, simultaneously -- remember, it must be "simultaneously" -- is placed into all the probabilities of your life after life.

This one life has countless possibilities; every choice you make represents a possibility. If you have seen the movie I recommended the day before yesterday, you will understand -- in Mr. Nobody¹⁵, that person experienced the possible outcomes of all possible lives. You would think it is so chaotic -- how can life be like this? But in this case, if this one life of yours has so many possibilities, then all your countless lives added together -- are there not countless possibilities? Those all exist within the probability system. That system has not manifested them in the three-dimensional world, but they are also developing.

So under this premise, you will understand: one part of your soul is focused in the world of probabilities, and another part of its energy is focused in the reincarnations of the ordinary three-dimensional world -- two parts of one person's energy simultaneously focused on matters in two different dimensions.

In other words, if you ask what the soul is? The soul is an omnipresent existence that is both here and there. You cannot define the soul as being only with your three-dimensional world. Sometimes it will say, for convenience, "When you sleep, your soul leaves, your consciousness leaves" -- that is a convenient way of saying it. Essentially, when the soul is in your three-dimensional world, it is also elsewhere at the same time.

So this is why he says he uses "multidimensional," repeatedly using "multidimensional you" to describe it. When the time of choosing arrives:

The kinds of choices available are far more numerous than for those who must go through reincarnation.

When does this happen? When these people have completed their final reincarnation and no longer need to reincarnate, when they die and the time of choosing arrives, the kinds of choices available to them are far more numerous than for those who must continue reincarnating -- remember, "must" reincarnate.

Reincarnation is not something you decide on your own -- it is not that you say "I do not want to reincarnate" and that is the end of it. You have to complete every piece of the soul's great puzzle before you can leave. Once you have finished the work of this puzzle, you no longer need to go back. When you are about to leave, you have far more choices than those who must go back and continue working on the puzzle. They do not have many choices -- just the three kinds already mentioned above.

If you have the inclination and the ability, there is always the opportunity to be a teacher.

Remember -- if you have that inclination, and you have this ability. Why must there be ability? Not just anyone can be a teacher. Because:

Multidimensional teaching is vastly different from what you know; it requires rigorous training.

This process of being a teacher is not something anyone can do; it requires very rigorous training and very high ability. Why? He will explain below.

Because such a teacher must be able to simultaneously teach the different parts of what may be called one identity.

See how professional the wording is -- "what may be called one identity." Let us just assume it is called an entity. These are the different parts of one entity, that is, the different reincarnated lives. What he teaches at this time is the whole of this entity, so if this entity has many reincarnations, does he not have to teach them simultaneously?

For example, a certain entity has fragment personalities incarnated in the fourteenth century, in the third century, in 260 BC¹⁶, and in the Atlantean period. Then this teacher must simultaneously contact these different personalities.

This is very tangled -- they are clearly in different historical periods, so how can you contact them simultaneously? So this teacher must travel through different space-times: at one moment going to the thirteenth century, at another moment going to the thirtieth century BC, and he even has to go to places like Atlantis.

He must communicate with them using terminology they can understand.

For example, if you go to 260 BC¹⁶, you have to use the language of that time, the environmental characteristics of that time, the knowledge that people of that time possessed, the social customs and cultural characteristics, and use these as the basis for communication. Otherwise you cannot communicate with them -- how could you be a teacher? If you do not even know what state this student lives in, his intellectual level, his level of knowledge, you cannot teach him.

These communications require that he have complete knowledge of the basic assumptions of those eras, as well as the general philosophical -- and he must also understand the local philosophical and scientific climate of thought of that time.

This is very simple: if you are teaching an ancient person, when Neo-Confucianism was flourishing, you have to know who Wang Yangming was; when you go to the Tang dynasty, to the Song dynasty, to ancient prehistoric civilizations, the knowledge background required is completely different. You have to understand the dynasty of that time, the social system, cultural customs, including how far the scientific knowledge of that time had progressed -- all of these must be used as material before you can educate him.

The entity may very well be exploring several probable systems simultaneously, and the teacher must also contact and communicate with these personalities.

Then, the amount of knowledge and training required makes such a teaching and dissemination enterprise extremely demanding. But this is a path that can be taken -- it is feasible, actually feasible.

The process of learning this material will necessarily help the teacher's development and abilities.

When he is communicating and exchanging with students, the teacher actually learns even more. When he studies the materials of different periods -- history, culture, geography, philosophy, and so on -- it also helps the teacher.

Skillful manipulation of energy is required, and frequent travel through various dimensions.

So once such a choice is made, training begins immediately. You say "I want to be a teacher," you have this ability and this inclination, and training begins right away.

Always under the guidance of an actual expert.

The teacher also needs a teacher -- the teacher's teacher is the expert. The true expert will come to help you and lead you.

This vocation will lead such a teacher into other realities that he previously did not even know existed.

He calls it a "vocation," because it is indeed a vocation. Because of this work, such a teacher will be led into other realities that he previously did not even know existed -- because he has to teach this student, and this student has many personality fragments that may be experimenting in different realities. You do not know which reality space he has gone to experiment in, but in order to teach him, you have to go with him, to go to the reality space where he is, to teach him there. When you arrive at that place, you first have to learn some basic things about that reality -- the environment, the level of scientific development, the social background, and so on -- you have to learn. So this also improves the teacher's own abilities.

He says there are others:

Those who have finished reincarnation and have a different kind of sum-total nature.

When we say being a teacher is one choice, there is another possibility: this person has completed reincarnation and has a "sum-total nature" -- that is, all natures are combined in him, all talents are present in him, all talents developed to their utmost. This person has concentrated all of humanity's talents together.

May begin the long journey toward becoming a creator.

At this time, this person chooses not to be a teacher, but to be a creator -- on a very different level.

This can be compared to the geniuses of the creative world in your own physical reality.

We can regard him as a genius of the creative world. Later he will explain -- he creates on different levels:

He does not use paint, nor pigments, nor words, nor musical notes; the creator experiments with actual dimensions instead.

That is, he uses real dimensions, real reality spaces, to experiment, in as many forms as possible -- note, he says "not referring to physical forms" -- to transmit knowledge.

What is this equivalent to? For example, there are teachers, and there are also people who make teaching aids. This kind of creator is similar to someone who makes teaching aids: his method of transmitting knowledge is not through speaking, communicating, or heart-to-heart talks, but through creating teaching aids. But do not think these teaching aids are all physical -- the moment I say teaching aids you think of physical things, but they are not only physical; they include teaching aids on the spiritual level and all kinds of teaching aids. He transmits knowledge through this form of creation.

What you would call time is manipulated as a painter manipulates pigments.

When we think time is something unchangeable, for him, for this maker of teaching aids, he manipulates time as a painter manipulates his pigments -- doing whatever he wants with it, painting however he wants, using time to construct what he wants to create. This goes beyond the normal patterns of our thinking.

What you would call space is gathered together by him in different ways.

We think space is continuous -- just as time is continuous -- and mutually exclusive: if this space is occupied by this thing, then that thing cannot occupy it. He says no. Space can be gathered together; space can be nested within space, layer upon layer. We will not expand on this further.

Art is thus created.

What does he use to create? Time as structure. He gives an example:

In your terms, time and space can be mixed together.

This is Einstein's theory -- the unity of space-time, the continuity of space-time, the inseparability of space-time; this is Einstein's entire theoretical system.

The beauty of various eras, the beauty of nature, paintings, and architecture are all recreated by these beginners.

He uses time as structure and space as the form of expression. These are all very abstract and hard for us to understand; let us not expand on them for now -- we cannot imagine what it means to make a work of art out of space and time. But all of this beauty -- the beauty of nature, the beauty of eras, the beauty of painting and architecture -- is recreated by these creators, these beginners. Remember he says "re" -- recreated.

As a method of learning.

"Beginners" are those who aspire to become creators -- when they finish reincarnation and choose not to be teachers but choose to be creators, these people are beginners. These artistic creations serve as a method of learning for these entities who need to learn.

One of their primary tasks, to which they devote the most concentrated attention, is to create as many different reality dimensions as possible, beauty that has an impact.

He is creating beauty. This "beauty" affects different dimensions -- it not only affects our three-dimensional world, but is also beautiful in the four-dimensional world, beautiful in the five-dimensional world, beautiful in the two-dimensional world, just as a painting of ours being beautiful follows the same principle. It is beautiful in as many different dimensions as possible.

For example, there is a certain work that appears one way in your system, but it will also be seen in probable reality systems, perhaps in completely different ways.

He says "do you understand?" -- Rob did not speak; Rob probably did not understand what he was trying to say; this is generally hard to understand.

It is a multidimensional art.

Remember, once this work of art is created, it is not a three-dimensional world art, nor is it of any single dimension; it is a multi-dimensional work of art.

There is thus such freedom and naturalness that it will appear in many realities simultaneously.

Because this work of art is multi-dimensional, it is so free and natural that it will appear in many realities simultaneously.

Let us give a rough figurative example -- this example is not entirely apt, but you can imagine it: we know that Ma Liang had a magic brush that could paint on walls, and the things painted became real. The painting itself is a two-dimensional thing. Suppose Ma Liang's brush is a multi-dimensional brush; the things it creates, in the two-dimensional world you see a painting on the wall, but in the three-dimensional world it is itself a three-dimensional object -- it is merely projected onto the wall and becomes a two-dimensional painting. And this brush itself can paint multi-dimensional spaces, so the thing he paints, you think it is in the three-dimensional world, but in fact in higher dimensions, in the four-dimensional world, it is also itself. So Ma Liang painted a gold ingot, and after the rich man took it away, the gold ingot turned into a pile of stones -- it changed, because it was not a three-dimensional gold ingot; it was only an illusion.

So we know that the brush Ma Liang held was not an ordinary brush -- not one that could only paint in the two-dimensional world, nor one that could only manifest in the three-dimensional world, but a brush of multi-dimensional space-time. His creation itself was created in multi-dimensional space-time, so many things created in the three-dimensional world can turn into something useless in the blink of an eye. This is a multi-dimensional work of art. Understanding it this way is enough -- only in this way can he provide different education and teaching to those beginners in different dimensions.

Such a work of art is beyond description in words.

That is, language cannot describe it.

This concept perhaps has no equivalent in words.

There are no words that can correspond to it; it cannot be described.

But these creators also devote themselves to providing inspiration to people on all the planes of probability that they can reach.

Although this work of art cannot be described, the creators devote themselves to providing inspiration to people on the planes they can reach -- not all planes can be reached, only those planes they can reach.

Do you understand? -- They provide inspiration.

For example, inspiration in your system is often the masterpiece of such creators.

In our three-dimensional world, in our system, inspiration is often the masterpiece of these creators (those who no longer need to reincarnate after death). They do not choose to be teachers; they choose to create works of art, to create teaching aids. The works of these creators of teaching aids cannot be perceived or seen in our three-dimensional world -- because that itself is a multi-dimensional creative work of art. But although you cannot sense the existence of this work of art in the three-dimensional world, it can give you inspiration, and inspiration is one of his works.

So many writers and artists -- including painters, musicians, sculptors, all kinds of artists -- many of them have a great deal of inspiration. Where does this inspiration come from? He is telling you now: it is the masterpiece of these people.

These art forms are often symbolic representations of the nature of reality.

This art is not created for nothing; ultimately it expresses beauty, of course, but what is its core? The core of this art form is to display the nature of reality. Most of the time, this artistic creation itself and the art form are symbols representing the essence of things, the world, and the universe.

Depending on the ability of the person who perceives it, they will be given different interpretations.

According to your level: if you are a wise person, upon seeing this work you may achieve great enlightenment, possibly; if you are an ordinary person whose wisdom is not that high, you may see it and feel it is so beautiful, a beauty beyond description, that it gives rise to countless joys; if you are an artist, it may give you many creative inspirations. Each person, according to their own abilities, perceives it differently.

In your terms, they may be living props.

What are living props? They are an event, a ready-made occurrence, or something like a stage play -- a scene, a setting, an event. It is not the kind of work of art we imagine, but rather something that happens to us; this event itself may be the work of art.

But they are always psychic structures.

You must remember: this work of art itself is a psychic structure, a spiritual structure. It uses an event to display its spiritual essence or spiritual structure.

Existing outside of any reality system.

This is a key point. The work it creates, this psychic structure, is interpreted differently by each person, but this work does not exist in any reality -- it is outside all realities. It is a psychic structure, or you may understand it as a spiritual structure; it is the same. It does not belong to any reality. But it can reach all the realities it is capable of reaching.

But at least partially perceived by many.

It is not within this reality; it is outside this reality system, but it can at least be partially perceived by many people -- you cannot sense all of it, only a part.

Some exist in what you might call the astral plane.

Those of us who often engage in spiritual practice speak of the astral plane, the astral body, and so on -- it may exist on that plane. Many people say that on the astral plane they can obtain much inspiration, can obtain many beautiful feelings, that it is indescribably beautiful there; in fact, it is on that plane that you can partially perceive it.

You perceive it when you visit in the sleep state.

Sometimes when you are sleeping, or during an out-of-body experience, you can feel that kind of place; when you reach the level of the astral body, you can perceive it. So many people have inspiration while sleeping.

In the half-sleeping, half-waking state, or in other states of dissociation, your conscious mind also senses bits and pieces of other art forms.

"Conscious mind" is your present conscious mind. Your present conscious mind can also perceive bits and pieces of other art forms -- not comprehensively, just a part, just a little.

There are various kinds of multidimensional art.

Remember, multidimensional art is not just one kind; there are various kinds.

So creators work on many levels.

Because there are different kinds of multidimensional art, this creator (the one who creates these works of art) works on many levels.

Below he says something most crucial; mark this as a key point:

The entire Christ story is such a creation.

After saying this, has he not offended all of Christianity? Certainly. He has offended all of Christianity. He says this Christ story is a creation by these creators on different levels.

Anyway, this Seth person, he doesn't live in the human world and isn't afraid of offending anyone, so he just says it. But this kind of thing, if someone is a true Christian, they would be very averse to hearing you say this. We need to understand such people, not blame them -- it's normal. A person has believed in something for decades, and you suddenly tell them it's actually just a story, a story made up by certain creators, then you've completely shattered and overturned their outlook on life and values.

He says some people choose to be healers. Just now we mentioned two types of people -- teachers, creators -- and there is a third type: being a healer, being a doctor. Of course:

This involves a far greater range than what you know as healing.

It's not the simple kind of treating illness and saving people you imagine.

These healers must be able to deal with all the levels experienced by the entity.

Deal with all levels -- including those in the human world, including those in probable systems, including those levels that are not on the earthly plane. You are familiar with all of them.

Directly helping those who are part of the entity.

That is, directly helping those who are part of the entity -- fragment personalities and the like. He is like a doctor, but more like a psychologist.

Again, this involves a manipulation that runs through the reincarnational patterns.

If he wants to reach all the levels involved with this entity, he must open up all the patterns of reincarnation, and he can operate them freely.

Again, great variations are involved here.

The healer faces all kinds of different difficulties -- the reincarnational selves of the entity he wants to heal -- and he begins to beckon them for treatment.

The healing involved is always psychic and spiritual.

Note, you need to understand this: he is not the same as a psychologist -- a psychologist treats psychological matters, while he treats psychic and spiritual matters.

These healers are always waiting to help every individual within the system that you now know.

Did you hear that? Every individual, you need to understand this. What he says is very roundabout, but actually it means the Earth system -- every individual within the system you now know.

And they also help every individual within other systems.

Besides the Earth system, every individual in other systems -- he is there to help them all. But you must remember: he is waiting to help all people, every single one. Understand? His level is very high -- he doesn't just help a certain type of person; he helps every single one.

In larger terms, there are more highly trained, more advanced healers who deal with the psychic illnesses of large groups of people.

There are also some more highly trained, advanced healers who do not heal individuals; they heal social illnesses -- they deal with the psychic illnesses of large groups of people, treating the psychological diseases of entire social groups. This level is very high -- one treatment covers a whole area, an entire social group, but the requirements are also very high.

Still others combine the characteristics of teacher, creator, and healer.

Combine these three characteristics -- he has all three abilities, integrating these three professions.

While some choose directions of development particularly suited to their own characteristics.

Some people like being teachers, some want to be artists, some want to be doctors -- these are your three main career choices after death. Some people say they want to do all three, which means you have all three characteristics, and they are not in conflict -- the first, the teacher, transmits knowledge; the second, the artist, creates works of art that are symbolic of universal reality, also helping you learn and understand universal reality; the third, the healer, is also someone who helps you on the psychic and spiritual levels. These three are not fundamentally very different -- they all help you improve. You can integrate all three skills, or you can develop in only one direction.

He says:

I do not, however, want to discuss in this chapter the purposes of continued consciousness or development.

He doesn't want to discuss this question here -- it would be very complicated to explain, and he'll talk about it later.

I only want to make clear that vast possibilities of progress are possible.

He's just telling you: after your consciousness dies, its possibilities for development are very great. Even after your reincarnational cycle ends, when you no longer need to reincarnate in the human world, your choices are even greater and your possibilities even greater. It is not that once your consciousness ends its reincarnational cycle, it arrives at a so-called Western Pure Land¹⁷, or reaches the body of consciousness, or reaches the entity, or reaches a state of All That Is that is perfectly still and unmoving, and then stops developing -- no. This development keeps developing all along, and this possibility of progress and expansion always exists.

The fact that each individual has complete freedom, you can choose freely.

Whether before death or after death, you choose freely, completely freely.

The development of consciousness is a natural attribute.

Underline this sentence. It is natural, it is not coerced. The development of consciousness is not someone forcing me to do something, setting a goal for me -- you must get into Tsinghua or Peking University, you must get into Harvard or Yale -- it's not like that. No one forces you. It is simply a natural attribute, just like when you plant a seed, naturally a small blade of grass grows, or a sapling, or a flower blooms.

All further development is innately present within the personality that you know.

Further development is innately present within the personality. What is this like? It's like saying the adult is innately present within the child. How do you understand this sentence? You will ultimately grow into an adult, but where does this adult naturally grow from? From the child. You are an adult living inside a child's body -- it's just that when the time is not yet ripe, you are a child, and after a certain point you become an adult.

The development of your soul and your consciousness is the same: it has different stages. This stage may be elementary, requiring reincarnation in the human world; the next stage may not require reincarnation, and you go on to be a doctor or a teacher; after being a doctor or a teacher ends, there may be even newer stages to develop. So your soul and consciousness are constantly developing, but it is continuous development.

The description of these after-death events may sound complicated.

It is very complicated -- especially if you are used to a simple story about heaven or eternal rest. If you like a simple story, then this after-death description is too complicated -- far more complicated than you imagined. You might think that after death you just go to heaven and that's simple; how could there be so much going on.

Unfortunately, words cannot describe many of the basic points I would like you to understand.

He says that up to now, he still cannot use words to describe the points he wants us to know. Although he has said so much, rambling on and on, he says there are still many points he cannot describe.

But within yourself you have the ability to release your intuition and accept this inner knowledge.

I cannot make you know the key points of that knowledge through language -- but don't be sad. Within yourself, that is, in your inner part, the part of the inner self, you have the ability to release your intuition and accept inner knowledge. You have the possibility of opening the inner system, opening the inner senses, and accepting more of your inner knowledge.

As you read this book, the words are meant to release your own intuitive abilities.

This is the key. When you read this book, even if you learn nothing and understand nothing, it doesn't matter; you only need to know that it can open the ability of your inner intuitive system.

Many people's greatest feeling after reading the Seth books is that their hearts feel so much brighter -- as if many questions we should have known in life, knowledge that our teachers, parents, and society should have told us, why did no one ever tell us? Only after reading the Seth material today do they realize, wow, it's a feeling of sudden enlightenment. And then that intuition makes you feel that this stuff makes sense. So this intuition means that it has actually already, without your noticing, activated your inner intuitive system and opened your intuitive ability.

When you read it, your own dreams will give you more information.

This is very interesting. I see many people in the comments saying -- many people in the QQ groups or Line groups talk about this; I've seen a lot of it, but I won't show everyone the evidence -- saying, "How come after listening to you explain the Seth books, my dreams are so vivid?" After listening at night or during the day, that very night they have an especially vivid dream. Many people leave comments like this.

So this tells you: when you read the Seth books, how much you comprehend is not important; what matters is opening your inner intuition. Your dreams will give you more information -- that inner self of yours understood when reading this book; your conscious level may not yet be able to keep up with it, but the you inside your soul, inside, understood and heard it.

And while you are awake, still within yourself.

That dream is very vivid, and when you are awake you will still know it -- this information is transmitted to you through dreams.

If you are alert to them.

Be alert. If you are not alert, you'll just treat it as a dream and let it pass; if you are alert, it is actually giving you more information.

There is no such simple end to the life that you know.

That is, after death, it is not like a heaven story -- after death you go to heaven; there is no such thing.

You have the freedom to understand your own reality, to further develop your abilities, and to feel deeply the essence of your own existence.

Feel deeply what? Feel that your essence is that of the soul -- your true body is the soul, not this physical body. This flesh body is only one of your perspectives, something projected out. What you more fundamentally are is your soul.

The essence of existence is originally a part of All That Is.

Your soul is a part of All That Is. All That Is divided into countless parts, and one of those parts is your soul. When you understand this, you understand: All That Is is everything, everything, everything in this world. You and all things are one; you are part of the creator of all things. You are both the creator and the created -- this is a very magical thing, but this world is just that magical.

This is the end of this chapter, and also the end of this session. Unless you have questions, this part is basically finished.

The following part is a small interlude in the middle of the class: Rob got a bit distracted -- his consciousness went to visit his father. So Ruburt, as the entity transmitting the material, noticed that Rob was absent -- Rob's energy was not on the recording, but had gone to visit his father. We won't go over this part; if you're interested, you can look at this later part of the session -- the matter of Rob and his father, and how he projected over to his father.

This Chapter 11 is a kind of overall summary of the whole after-death life, or rather its final part. More will be introduced later, but the main body is in Chapters 9, 10, and 11 as an important summary.

This chapter has a lot of content, and everyone may find it rather tiring to listen to, but there's no way around it, because these things are all unfamiliar to us. He is using the matter of death to hint at the matter of life. I hope it gives everyone an ontological触动, and can stimulate the intuitive perceptual system within everyone, giving you a feeling of resonance in your heart. In that way, you will pay more attention to your inner reality, and not just stay at the level of "what Seth said, what Seth talked about."

All those things are already within you. Your dreams will tell you; your inner perceptual system will give them to you -- that is your reality, not the reality Seth tells you about. What you need to explore is your own reality, not the reality Seth describes to you. You must understand what the essence of this is -- the essence is not what others tell you, but what you yourself perceive.

---

注释与核实

1. Source: Wikipedia, "Wave function collapse" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wave_function_collapse) ↩

2. This claim could not be verified. ↩

3. Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica, "Roe v. Wade" (https://www.britannica.com/event/Roe-v-Wade) ↩

4. Source: Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy, "Huineng (Hui-neng)" (https://iep.utm.edu/huineng/) ↩

5. Source: Laozi, "Tao Te Ching, Chapter 25" (from "A Collated and Annotated Edition of Laozi's Tao Te Ching," hosted by the Chinese Text Project, ctext.org) (https://ctext.org/wiki.pl?if=en&chapter=554341) ↩

6. Source: Wikipedia, "Mr. Nobody (film)" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Nobody_(film)) ↩

7. Source: Wikipedia, "Black Mirror" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Mirror) ↩

8. Source: Martín Abadi and David G. Andersen, "Learning to Protect Communications with Adversarial Neural Cryptography" (2016) (https://arxiv.org/abs/1610.06918) ↩

9. Source: Wikipedia, "Seth Material" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Material) ↩

10. Source: New Awareness Network (Seth Center), "The Early Sessions" (The Early Sessions) (https://sethcenter.com/the-early-sessions/) ↩

11. Mike's exact wording was "Messages from the Spirit World"; upon verification, the correction is: "The correct title of the Seth book channeled by Jane Roberts is 'Messages of the Spirit World' (The Seth Material), published in 1970, rather than 'Messages from the Spirit World.'" (Source: Wikipedia, "Seth Material", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seth_Material) ↩

12. Source: Jane Roberts, "The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression (A Seth Book)" (https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Nature_of_the_Psyche_A_Seth_Book.html?id=cAHsSU40kbwC) ↩ ↩²

13. Source: Jane Roberts, "The Nature of Personal Reality: A Seth Book" (https://books.google.com/books/about/The_Nature_of_Personal_Reality.html?id=_uSztdbBToAC) ↩ ↩²

14. Source: Wikipedia, "Diamond Sutra" (https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-cn/%E9%87%91%E5%89%9B%E7%B6%93) ↩

15. Source: Wikipedia, "Mr. Nobody (film)" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mr._Nobody_(film)) ↩

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

17. This claim could not be verified. ↩