The "Introduction" and "Key Points" for this chapter were summarized by an AI editor based on the main text below; they are not things Mike said during the lecture. The main text comes from Mike's commentary, and the blockquotes are Seth's original words (the portions Mike read aloud).
Guide
All levels of consciousness converge within the personality. Consciousness can turn outward or inward, fluctuate and shift its focus; different levels of consciousness appear with different symbols, from surface material images, fantasies, and dreams to the deep symbol-free pure feeling. The physical world, the body, and sound itself are also symbols; personal experience is stored as a "symbol bank" that needs to be activated. The alpha state is a transitional state between the physically oriented self and the inner self, and can serve as a launching pad for exploring other levels of consciousness. Symbols flow and change; fear can restrict their meaning, and blank points can accommodate new symbols.
Key Points of This Chapter
- All levels of consciousness converge within the personality; surface consciousness and deep consciousness cannot be set up as a binary opposition.
- Consciousness can turn, fluctuate, and change focus; different stages of consciousness appear through different symbols.
- The physical world, the body, and sound itself are also symbols; the more precise a symbol is, the less meaning it contains.
- Personal experience is stored as a "symbol bank," which needs to be activated before it can function.
- The alpha state is a transitional state between physical orientation and the inner self, and can serve as a launching pad for exploring other levels of consciousness.
Main Text
Let us continue with Chapter Eighteen of the Seth book Seth Speaks -- the various stages of consciousness, symbols, and multiple focuses. Starting with this chapter, we will explore the nature of consciousness and the levels of consciousness in a very professional manner. This chapter will be slightly difficult, but if everyone follows my line of thought as we go along, I think there should not be any major problems, but you must concentrate.
All Aspects of Consciousness Converge in the Personality
At the beginning of this chapter, Seth points out something very crucial:
Whether you know it or not, all aspects of your consciousness converge in your personality.
That is, the you in the present moment, this personality, has many layers of consciousness. The previous chapter already discussed that when you sleep, the various levels of dreams—under the various states of sleep, your consciousness enters into different levels. And what is said here is that all these layers of consciousness are you. Although we can only perceive this small part of surface consciousness, the other consciousness may escape our attention. Some subconsciousness occasionally shows itself, but some deeper consciousness we simply cannot perceive at all.
He says, whether you know it or not, whether you feel it or not, whether you are aware of it or not—all the layers of this consciousness, from shallow to deep, all converge in your present personality, and they are all part of you. And what we can generally be aware of is only that part of surface consciousness, which we recognize as ourselves. For the slightly deeper layers of consciousness, we no longer think that is ourselves; we think that has nothing to do with us. We have split ourselves in a dualistic way: we think the conscious self is ourselves, and the other subconscious self seems to be another self. We use a term—"inner self," "soul"—to represent it.
When we describe it, we can make this kind of distinction, and describing it this way is fine. But in your mind, you must always keep an impression: the you that dreams, the subconscious you, the underlying you, the you that you have not fully become aware of at all—all of them are you, and you must be able to understand this. You cannot split yourself in a dualistic way, deeply dividing into inner self and outer self, soul and original self, higher self and inner self, and so on. All dualistic ways of thinking are wrong; the whole of you is you.
The Fluctuation and Turning of Consciousness
At the beginning of this chapter, Seth first tells you: how many levels and layers consciousness can be divided into, and what all those symbols of consciousness mean. Let us continue reading:
Obviously consciousness can be turned in many directions.
Consciousness can be like a searchlight; it can look outward, and it can also look inward. So consciousness can be directed inward, and it can also be directed outward.
You are aware of the fluctuations of your normal consciousness.
Your consciousness is not always directed in one single direction, and consciousness itself has a fluctuating nature. It is not, as you might imagine, steadily focused on one fixed point. Consciousness is fluctuating.
Closer attention will make some of these fluctuations quite clear.
If you observe your own consciousness very attentively, observe your own thoughts, you will find that some of these fluctuations become clear to you -- previously you had not noticed them, and now they become clear. You will constantly expand or contract the range of your attention. "Fluctuation" means that the range of your consciousness, the focus of your consciousness, is at one moment large and at another moment small. The focus of your attention differs, and the range also differs.
At times, however, you may become so engrossed in one thing that you are almost oblivious to everything else, so that you are really unaware of the room in which you sit.
Sometimes when you concentrate on doing a certain thing, you truly reach a state of complete self-forgetfulness -- forgetting both things and self. There is a Chinese idiom, "forgetting both things and self," meaning that the surrounding things and yourself are all forgotten, and you are absorbed in the thing itself. Sometimes the surrounding environment of the room also ceases to exist. Many of us, when concentrating on doing something, have at times had this feeling. Although it is not common, it does happen.
You may be highly conscious of a remembered event and react to it so strongly.
This kind of recalled event is something every one of us has experienced. For example, those key events at critical moments in your life within your memories -- this kind of very meaningful recollection will make you react extremely strongly, to the point that you are relatively oblivious to what is before you.
The first example above is: when you concentrate on doing a certain thing, you enter a state of forgetting both things and self, and you can have no perception of the things around you, forgetting the existence of this world. There is also another possibility, which is when you are recalling something that produces an especially strong reaction in you. This kind of thing happens to both men and women, though women may be somewhat more intense about it. For example, a woman recalls the scene of breaking up with the boyfriend she loved most -- those fragments of the breakup, the details, all the words spoken, all the glances, including the entire state of that day. When one day she sees someone on the street who looks very much like her ex-boyfriend, she suddenly enters, in a daze, into the memory of that breakup state -- in a certain instant she forgets what is before her eyes, and is instantly pulled into that memory. Other people's normal perception is: this person suddenly freezes in place, standing there in a trance, unresponsive, with no reaction to what is before her, unable to come back to herself for a while. We often say "unable to come back to herself." She is deeply immersed in this conscious recollection of a past event, so the focus of her consciousness is fixed on that remembered event, just the same as when the focus of your consciousness is fixed on what you are doing before you. Because at this time the focus of consciousness is in the process of narrowing, and once it narrows, you no longer pay attention to other things around you.
You take all these rises and falls of consciousness for granted, as normal.
Every day in our lives we experience similar things. These fluctuations of consciousness do not make you uneasy: if you become so absorbed in reading that you temporarily forget your own surroundings, you are not afraid; when you turn your attention back to reality, the surrounding environment will not be gone, and you do not worry that the surrounding environment is no longer there. When you have a daydream, or when you are deeply absorbed in thinking about something, you usually do not worry about being unable to return to this present moment of reality. You know it is a daydream, and after you wake up from it, after you come back to yourself, everything before you will still exist. You also do not worry about entering into that memory and being unable to come back; you simply do not worry about this at all. So in real life, we do have some awareness of these fluctuations of consciousness, but we do not think much of them.
To some extent, all of these are small examples of the mobility of your consciousness and the ease with which it can be utilized.
What do these words refer to? They refer to the mobility of consciousness, in other words, the shifting of the focus of consciousness -- and they are also a demonstration of this mobility of consciousness, and also proof that the focus of consciousness can shift. The two examples given above both show that the focus of your consciousness can shift. Consciousness is not only fixed on the things before you in the present moment; it can be transferred, it can be moved.
What Is a Symbol
In a strange way, symbols can be seen as examples of your "ways of perception" at various different levels of consciousness. Their changing guises can serve as signposts.
What he says here may not be clear to you at first. What he means is this: your consciousness can shift, it can move here, move there, in different directions, different ranges, different sizes of focus, different amplitudes, and even in depth or shallowness. At the various levels of consciousness, different symbols will appear to you. These different symbols represent the fact that your consciousness is at different levels — through your recognition of the symbol, you know what level your consciousness is at.
If you have seen the movie Inception1, there is a small detail in it: when you spin that little top, seeing the image of the spinning top indicates that you have returned to the real world; if you do not see the image of the spinning top, it means you have been in a dream all along, in multiple dreams, a dream within a dream, and you are still dreaming, you have not returned to the real world. Because when your dream is extremely vivid, you cannot tell the difference between dream and reality, so they used that spinning top as a symbolic object, a symbol that brings you back to reality. This is one example to help you understand what a symbol is.
Starting from "Fire": The Progression of Consciousness Levels
Below, Seth uses a simple example to help you understand what a "symbol" is, and what a symbol actually represents at the different levels of your consciousness.
For example, "fire" -- the burning fire we talk about -- is a concretized, materialized, physical, substantial fire blazing away here in our three-dimensional world. Fire itself is a symbol. What is a real fire trying to tell you? When you sense that a real fire truly exists, it is trying to tell you one thing: that you are perceiving reality with your physical consciousness. Fire is a physical perception for your eyes; the hot, baking sensation on your body, on your skin, is also a perception; if it burns something, that scorched smell, including the smell of burning wood or other things -- the fragrance of a candle -- these olfactory sensations are also perceptions for you. But these perceptions are all physical perceptions. So when you sense an actual fire, it symbolizes this: you are right now using the physical perceptual system of your consciousness, your consciousness is at the most surface level of consciousness, and you are using the most surface, physical consciousness to perceive this physical reality.
If an imagined picture of fire...
Suppose at this moment you imagine a picture of fire in your mind, not a real fire. For example, when you are in winter, you know the story of "The Little Match Girl"2 -- that little girl, because she was so cold, lit a match and cupped that tiny warmth in her palms, and she felt the sensation of that fire, which was a physical sensation. Then she produced a kind of hallucination, and in her hallucination, that fire grew bigger and bigger, warming her entire body, and she even fantasized about being in a warm home, eating a Christmas feast, eating turkey, and so on. So when we imagine a picture of fire in our minds -- for example, in a cold season, or on a pitch-black night, when we need light, when we need fire, we can imagine a picture of fire -- this automatically tells you that another state of consciousness is already involved: you are using your consciousness to imagine this fire, and you are no longer using your physical sensory consciousness to feel the fire. So this consciousness is different from the consciousness you used earlier to perceive fire with your physical body. This is a mental imagination in your mind, a picture in your mind. At this point your consciousness has already entered an imaginative state, and it tells you that the level of consciousness, or the range of the focus of consciousness, is already different.
A fire seen in the mind, a fire in the head, warms without destroying things. This obviously indicates something else.
Fire in the mind can also bring you warmth. When the picture of fire appears, it can also bring you a feeling of warmth, but it will not burn things -- that is certain. So you know that the symbolic meaning of this fire in the mind indicates that at this moment your consciousness is in an imaginative state, and it is already not the same state of consciousness as your physical consciousness.
All symbols are meant to express feelings. Feelings that can never be adequately expressed in words.
That is, when you cannot accurately express a feeling in words, you often feel it in a symbolic way. So pictures appear in the mind, and these pictures sometimes cannot be expressed in words or language. For example, the feeling of warmth that fire brings you in your mind -- you can use the word "warmth" to indicate it, but that is far from representing your real feeling -- it is just a word.
Symbols represent the infinite variations of feelings. Because there are many kinds of feelings: you can feel fire, feel cold, feel anger, feel fear, feel joy, feel happiness; you can feel the deliciousness of being full, and you can also feel hunger. Your feelings are infinite, so these symbols are also infinite. And at the different stages of consciousness -- this chapter discusses the different stages of consciousness, that is, the different levels of consciousness -- at the different stages of consciousness, these symbols will appear in different ways. You must remember: at the different stages of consciousness, the ways these symbols manifest are also different. But they will always follow you -- although the ways of symbols differ at different levels, they will always follow you.
There are, however, a few exceptions, involving pure knowledge and pure feeling, without the necessity of symbols.
There are also a few exceptions, without symbols -- pure knowledge and pure feeling. These stages of consciousness are very rare, and they are seldom translated into normal conscious terms. Do such stages exist? Yes, they do, but they rarely occur -- that is, pure knowledge, pure feeling, without any image, without any representation, and without anything symbolic. So this is also very difficult to express in conscious terms; even if it exists, you cannot say it, and you cannot translate it into your conscious terms.
On Research Below Consciousness
These things already touch on a fairly deep exploration of human consciousness, and this is also a question many psychologists have always wanted to explore. Many psychologists, in the end, have actually been studying consciousness and the subconscious all along. As for the research of psychologists, you can see a great deal in all kinds of materials.
For example, I once read a book before called Micropsychology3, a book I later could not find again. It was probably around the time I was in college, when that book was available. I still remember the author was a Dutch psychologist, with a name something like "Fang" or something, I cannot recall. This person was either a "Jian" or a "Fang," roughly one of those two, but I really cannot remember. In the past couple of days I searched for it and still could not find this Micropsychology4. I do not know what the reason is regarding this book.
What did this Micropsychology4 study? What it studied was: what else exists beneath the subconscious. Because Freud said that the human subconscious is the source of all motives and starting points5, and that psychological and external events in the three-dimensional world all come from the subconscious. Then this person used the methods of scientific experiment -- the methods of scientific experiment in psychology -- to conduct experiments on all kinds of subjects. He was a professional psychologist, using experimental methods and empirical methods to prove what exactly lies beneath the subconscious. That book laid out the entire process of his experiments, the methods of his experiments, and also the conclusions of his experiments. His final conclusion was: beneath the subconscious, according to his conclusion, when you dig further down, digging all the way to the very bottom, what is beneath the subconscious? It is emptiness, just these two words -- emptiness. Beneath the subconscious is a vast emptiness, nothing at all. That is, when you use conscious awareness to excavate the subconscious and dig downward, it is all emptiness, nothingness. It is the same feeling as when we explore the universe and the deepest part is a vast emptiness.
In other words, he dug down to the stage of the unconscious, and he thought that was the end of it, that emptiness was the end, that there was nothing at all. Actually, we know that beneath that there is still something. Beneath the subconscious there is still a great deal of the unconscious, and beneath the unconscious there are still many, many wonderful things, which are the questions we need to explore. But using the so-called scientific methods of human beings, those places are areas that modern times cannot investigate or explore, just as the deepest part of the universe is also a place human beings cannot investigate -- it is the same principle. Many scientists believe that since it cannot be investigated, cannot be proven, cannot be demonstrated, and cannot be seen through experimental methods, then it does not exist -- this is a limitation of science. But I clearly know that there is still something down there. If there were nothing there, you could not explain one problem: if there is nothing beneath the subconscious, then where does your subconscious come from? We know that our consciousness is born out of the subconscious, so where does your subconscious come from? Then it would come from emptiness, right? Then it becomes something that cannot be explained theoretically.
So we will not discuss that question now. What I want to tell you is this: at the level he spoke of, it cannot be understood by our normal consciousness. That kind of pure knowledge, pure concept, with no symbols and no images at all, is something you cannot understand, and you cannot explain it.
Using "Joy" as an Example: Tracing the Different Stages of Consciousness
Seth says:
Let us take one particular feeling and trace it, and see what it can look like when expressed at different stages of consciousness.
That is, look at what the symbols of this feeling are at different stages of consciousness. At this point Seth is thinking about what to use as an example, and he says: let us use joy.
Let us begin with the feeling of joy.
In normal consciousness, that is, our ordinary surface consciousness, the person feeling joy will perceive their immediate environment in a way very different from when they are at a low point. The feeling of joy changes the objects themselves, in that the perceiver sees them in a much brighter way, so as to create more vivid objects in a clearer fashion, and thus the beauty of the environment in turn further enhances their joy.
We have all experienced this in real life. For example, today your boss says you are getting a raise, from 5,000 to 8,000, and just that small thing gives you an inexplicable joy. Or today you confess to a girl you like, she accepts, and the two of you confirm your relationship as boyfriend and girlfriend, and at that moment you also feel an inexplicable joy. The same goes for girls. For instance, a girl has been secretly in love with a boy, but she is too shy to express it directly, so she often sends out little signals and hints to the boy to show her affection, but does so very subtly. Yet when she discovers that the boy seems to have picked up on her hints, or somehow suddenly confesses to her, that inner joy, that sense of happiness, is exactly this kind of joy.
This joy is completely different from how she feels at a low point, at a low point in her life. Everything she sees in the world — the flowers, the trees, the clouds, the sky — seems to carry a very bright color, all sparkling and shining. Everyone who has been in love has had this experience: everything you look at sparkles, everything carries joy and happiness, as if everything were smiling. The feeling of the wind on your body is different, the feeling of the sunlight on your body is different. At this moment, it is her joyful mood, and she projects this feeling of joy onto her external environment. Once projected, this joyful mood changes the external things, and those things become different — and this "different" means different from how they were at her low point, different from how they were in her ordinary state.
She sees everyone as if they were full of goodwill toward her, everyone smiling at her. In fact, the external things may not have changed at all: the mountain is still that mountain, the tree is still that tree, the sky is still that sky. But for her, these things have all changed. That is, the feeling of joy has changed all of it. And after this change, when she sees the more vivid flowers, the greener grass, the bluer sky, the gentler and warmer breeze, including the fragrance of the flowers, the scent of the plants, the smell of the green grass — all of these give her a feedback, and this feedback further enhances her feeling of joy, and then she sees these things as even more beautiful.
So this is a normal state, a state of normal consciousness in our experience of joy. At this point, what she sees is still concrete — what she sees are all concrete objects of the physical world. We can count this as the very surface stage, the first stage.
Now we enter the next stage of consciousness —
Now let us suppose that he begins to daydream and falls into a fantasy... In this daydream fantasy, images or symbols of objects, people, and events come into his mind, perhaps from an imagined past, present, or future. At this time the joy expresses itself mentally with greater freedom, but it is represented symbolically... It can be said that this joy extends into the future, and its light also shines upon the past, possibly encompassing a greater range than could be expressed in concrete terms at that moment.
This is the second stage of consciousness — fantasy, whether you call it daydreaming or fantasy. For example: suppose this person enters a state of daydream fantasy, that the girl he loves has agreed to be with him, or that the prince charming in your heart has come to propose to you. Let us imagine that this state has occurred, and that it occurs in your daydream, in your fantasy state.
Not the kind of imagining you do while fully awake, but entering a state of daydreaming, that is, having a beautiful dream while awake. In this space of fantasy, all of this happens. When all of this happens, you will have many, many imaginings: you will imagine how you will live together, where the two of you will go to live, what the layout of the house will be like, how you will live together — whether he will make you breakfast in the morning, how the two of you will have breakfast together in a very beautiful setting, and then how you will go on to live happily together, and so on. These beautiful imaginings about future life unfold completely.
And does this unfolding not also illuminate the world of your future, which has not yet happened? This is different from the first kind of "illumination," where the flowers and plants before your eyes become brighter — this illuminates the things of your future. And at the same time, does it not also illuminate the things of your past? At this point, when you recall the little moments from before your relationship was confirmed, you will discover: oh, so all of those things meant that he had feelings for me; oh, so that gesture or that event — I misunderstood him at the time.
You know, sometimes the more a girl likes a boy, the more she may actually act in a certain way; the same goes for boys. Sometimes the more a boy likes a girl, the more he will play pranks on her, or act as if he does not like her, and so on, making the other person feel very disappointed and downcast. That low mood is very gloomy. But when, in his fantasy, their relationship is confirmed, he will think: oh, so all those things she did were expressions of love for me, signs that she liked me! I misunderstood her at the time — through this confirmation in the present, in the imagined moment, the confirmation of the relationship, all those gloomy things of the past are swept away and become entirely bright. All those unpleasant things that happened in the past, the sad things that once made you secretly cry several times, all become very sweet and happy, and become meaningful.
So in this state of fantasy, this feeling of joy not only illuminates the present, but also illuminates the past and the future. It can, within a larger scope — within the scope of consciousness — make your whole being joyful, and it also changes your view of those past events and changes your past perceptions. In such an imagined state of consciousness, its scope is far greater than "seeing the flowers and plants become brighter" in the three-dimensional world, and its influence is far more profound. Does it not have a very good healing effect on you!
Let us continue to imagine, using this method of imagining, to follow the levels of this consciousness and see just how many levels and stages this consciousness has.
Let us continue, and suppose that from fantasy... he falls into a trance state, or into a deep sleep.
This person is sitting there thinking about his happy life, his future happiness, and when he becomes too absorbed, let us suppose he enters a trance state. We all know what a "trance state" is: it is the state where you no longer feel the existence of the physical world, and you enter completely into a state where both self and surroundings are forgotten. Or perhaps, carrying this joyful fantasy, he enters deep sleep. Seth pauses here for a long while — he is actually organizing his language, thinking about how to explain this.
He may see things that are highly symbolic to him of joy and exuberance... Logically, there may be little connection between them, but intuitively the connection is very clear. He has now entered into a much deeper psychic experience than in the fantasy state... and there may be a series of dreams in which he is able to express his joy and share it with others.
After entering this deeper level of consciousness, these images begin to lose strong logical coherence. You can only feel an inexplicable joy, an inexplicable happiness, and an inexplicable exuberance, but there is a certain connection among them — it is just that the logical coherence is no longer as strong as in the three-dimensional world or in fantasy. That is, there is a series of exuberant events, or a series of joyful images, brought to you.
So in that state, you understand: the appearance of such symbols means that your consciousness has entered a deeper level. The images in dreams, those figures, those symbolic things, those stories, those characters — all of them indicate that your consciousness has entered a deeper stage.
He is still, however, dealing with symbols that are physically oriented.
That is, there are still things, still objects, still people, still things of the three-dimensional world, only they appear in the dream.
Now since we are using this discussion as an example, let us follow him further... This person may form very happy dreams, dreams of cities and people, and then translate the joyful emotion itself into whatever symbols are appropriate for him... Exuberance may be translated into playful animals, flying people, or extremely beautiful animals and scenery. Again, there is still a lack of logical connection, but the entire episode will be strung together by this emotion.
From surface consciousness to fantasy consciousness, and then into trance consciousness or dream consciousness — this is the third level. In the third level, there are still some things of the three-dimensional world, with a certain logic, but the logical connections are no longer so strong. For example, he may dream that he and the person he likes are together and something happens, but this is not something that could happen in the three-dimensional world, or at this present location.
Going further down, we enter another level: in dreams there will appear connections with even less logic. For example, there will appear a happy city, a joyful city, a city brimming with happiness and full of joy. Everyone in this city is radiant with joy, and you can see very beautiful people flying in the sky, flying back and forth like fairies, like angels. The scenery in this city is simply magnificent beyond compare; the plants and flowers are so beautiful they cannot be described, cannot be described in the language of the three-dimensional world, and so on.
What are all these things? They are all a deeper expression and symbol of that feeling of joy. Between them there is even less logic — by the time you reach this fourth level, the logical connections between things are already quite unclear, but they are still strung together by that joyful emotion: they are all happy things, like flying yourself, or seeing others fly, which is in itself a happy thing; and then seeing these kind people, these beautiful scenes, this beautiful scenery, and so on — all of it is strung together by this cheerful, joyful emotion. But this has nothing to do with the two of you being together, or her accepting your proposal or confession — it has nothing to do with that specific, original feeling anymore. It has already spread outward.
Have you noticed? Every time his consciousness goes one level deeper, its scope expands, its influence expands, and the range it involves grows larger and larger, even reaching things beyond the scope of logic.
At the same time, while having this beautiful dream — while your consciousness enters this fourth-level state — your physical body receives tremendous benefit. It is not only a spiritual benefit; it is beneficial to your physical body:
For the beneficial feeling automatically renews and strengthens the body's recuperative abilities.
So this beneficial feeling automatically strengthens your body's recovery. Many people, when they wake up from a beautiful dream, feel an obvious sense of physical comfort.
The feeling of joy may lead to images of Christ, Buddha, or the prophets.
So this joyful feeling can also bring forth these things — these images of the gods in your heart are all brought forth by you.
These symbolic images are the characteristic changing scenes of consciousness at its various stages.
These symbols are characteristic of consciousness at different levels — the characteristics of each level are different. At the surface level, it is seeing the bright natural scenery; in fantasy, it is fantasizing about scenes that could actually happen but have not happened, those possible scenarios; at a deeper level, it is the derivatives connected to that event; and deeper still, it may have no connection to that event at all, but all the various symbolic things that this joyful emotion could represent, strung together by this joyful emotion, are displayed.
When you perceive the manner of these symbols, or their characteristics and features, you know which level your consciousness is on. These symbols are like signposts — symbols are like road signs for your consciousness, telling you that you have entered the first level, the second level, the third level, the fourth level, the fifth level.
This experience should be regarded as creation... the natural creative behavior of consciousness at its various stages.
The appearance of symbols at different levels of consciousness, the appearance of symbolic objects, or the appearance of the environment represented by symbols — all of these can be seen as creation. It is your consciousness creating, only the level of creation is different: sometimes creating in dreams, sometimes creating in fantasy, sometimes creating in the three-dimensional world. You must understand that this process is creation.
The Disappearance of Symbols: The Soul Together with Its Feelings
After transcending this fourth level of consciousness just described—where even divine beings appear, the Buddha, Christ all appear—beyond that, these symbols also begin to gradually fade away, becoming blurred and distant. That joyous city gradually recedes from you, the people flying in the sky also gradually recede from you, those prophets also gradually recede from you, and your feeling of them becomes more and more blurred, more and more blurred.
Here you begin to draw back into the regions of consciousness in which symbols become less and less necessary.
This is entering the fifth level of consciousness. At this level, symbols are no longer important. But this process is progressive, not all at once—it moves step by step from the symbols becoming more and more blurred, more and more distant, until finally they are gone, they disappear.
And it is indeed a sparsely populated region... Symbols flicker and fade, symbols appear and disappear, and finally vanish altogether.
He uses a figurative analogy: in that state, it is like a sparsely populated region, where no images remain, no symbols remain, and finally the symbols all disappear. Then consciousness moves further and further away from matter, further and further away from material things.
At this stage of consciousness, the soul finds itself alone with its own feelings. Stripped of symbols and images, it begins to perceive the vast reality that only it knows.
Who is it? The soul. At this time the soul is stripped of all symbols, all images, and at this stage it begins to understand itself—it is the soul, it is beginning to understand the vast reality of the soul, which is its true reality. Why were symbols used before? They were just symbols. Only now does it understand the true reality.
This passage exactly verifies what is said in the Buddhist Diamond Sutra:
All appearances are illusory. If you see all appearances as non-appearances, then you see the Tathagata.6
That is, when you see all appearances in the world—this includes the appearances your physical eyes see, and also the appearances you see in dreams, and also the appearances you see in meditation, and also the appearances you see in out-of-body experiences—all of these appearances, all appearances in the world. All appearances, not just the appearances your eyes see, all appearances—appearances in dreams are also appearances, appearances in meditation and contemplation are also appearances, including what you call chakras, those chakras are also appearances—all are illusory, all are phantoms. "If you see all appearances as non-appearances," that is, when you can see, suppose you can see all appearances as "non-appearances," when you see all appearances as non-existent, "then you see the Tathagata"—only then can you enter such a state of wisdom, the wisdom state of the "Tathagata" like the Buddha.
What is said here is the same as what is said in this passage: when you enter the deepest, deepest level of consciousness, no images remain, no symbols remain, no signs remain, everything becomes pure. At this time you will find that you are together with your own perception. What is the perception at this time? The feeling of joy! The feeling of joy you first experienced! At this time that feeling of joy is clearly and distinctly together with your true self—without needing to rely on any image, and without needing to rely on any external symbolic meaning of images. It is this feeling of joy, this existence, clearly and distinctly existing together with your soul.
So this is a state, a level and a graded state of consciousness. It is perfectly normal if you cannot reach this state; it requires continuous practice, self-reflection, self-contemplation, and step by step, little by little, you can come into contact with that state.
It feels direct experience. If we use joy as an example, all its psychic symbols and images will finally disappear... They emerge from joy, and they will depart from it... for they are not the original experience, but by-products.
You must understand this: those feelings—you see flowers becoming brighter, everyone seems to want to smile at you, and so on—those are all by-products of experience, not the experience itself. Because you have not entered the deeper level, you cannot experience the experience itself; you can only experience its by-products.
The soul then begins to explore this reality of joy in ways that are almost impossible to explain.
That is, at this point language has already lost its meaning; at this stage it cannot be described in words. No one can describe it—even the Buddha, even Laozi, whoever reaches this stage is left speechless. It has already gone beyond the scope of human language, and even beyond the scope of your imagination.
And in so doing, it will learn methods of perception, expression, and actualization that previously it simply could not understand.
When your soul is at this level, having cast off all symbols, directly feeling the essence of this joy, when it explores the essence of this joy, it will learn from it—those perceptions that previously it simply could not understand. If it had never perceived joy before, the first time it perceives joy, this is something it could not perceive before; it did not know what joy was, and now it truly knows what joy is. And then it also knows what the forms of expression of joy are, and then how to actualize joy—since it has learned it, it can actualize it; do not forget that it can actualize it.
These few words are very crucial, you must know them: it can not only perceive what it previously could not understand, including such forms of expression it could not understand, including such methods of actualization it could not understand—now it can understand all of them, it can comprehend all of them. At this point we cannot elaborate further either; let us stop here on this section.
The Material World Is Also a Kind of Symbol
In between there were a few questions Rob wanted to ask Seth, but these questions are not important, so I won't go into them. Then he asked a third one about who Christ really was, and Seth did not really want to explore that question too much with him either. Seth went on to say:
Now of all your symbols, the object is the most obvious one.
That is to say, the matter of our three-dimensional world, these objects, are the most obvious kind of symbol.
And for this very reason... you do not realize that they are symbols at all.
It is precisely because objects are so obvious that you do not realize at all that they are also symbols -- you do not even know that the material world around us, these tables, chairs, benches, mountains, and rivers, are actually symbols. They are a symbol of what you feel, a kind of symbol of you at different levels of consciousness. They are merely a symbol of consciousness at its most superficial level, in the three-dimensional world, of our most surface consciousness. Because it is too real, too obvious -- you do not need to fantasize, you do not need to imagine, you do not need your consciousness to enter so many levels, this is something you can feel at the most superficial level -- you forget that it is actually a symbol.
This part was already discussed in the earlier chapters: if you treat language and written words as a kind of symbol of your thoughts and consciousness, then why are the things around you not also a kind of symbol of your consciousness? Do you remember that example? He talked about it, he gave an example regarding a book, and it made a point.
So he tells you that the world around us, the objects around us, are also a kind of symbol.
At different levels, consciousness uses different kinds of symbols.
At different levels of consciousness, he uses different categories of symbols -- not different symbols, but different categories of symbols, and this word "category" emphasizes that they are symbols of different kinds.
Symbols are a method of expressing inner reality.
Symbols are a method of expressing your inner reality, a method by which what is in your mind is made manifest.
When the soul works in one direction, it uses its consciousness, through as many symbols as possible, through living, vital, ever-changing symbolic meanings to express inner reality.
When the soul focuses its attention on working in a certain direction, it uses its consciousness -- here consciousness is like a tool used by the soul. You must understand that the soul uses this consciousness, so consciousness is a tool of the soul. The soul uses its consciousness, through as many symbols as possible -- living, vital, ever-changing symbolic meanings -- to express inner reality. These symbols are constantly changing, in order to express the inner reality of his soul.
And so each symbol itself is to some extent conscious, with its own uniqueness and perception.
He said "living" earlier. What does "living" mean? It means that these symbols themselves are also alive and conscious. The soul creates through them -- and this itself is also a creative process.
Symbols and the Deep Exploration of Consciousness
At different levels, the soul uses this tool of consciousness, through as many symbols as possible, through these living, ever-changing symbolic meanings to express inner reality. Each symbol itself is to some extent conscious, with its own uniqueness and perception. In so doing, the soul continues to create new inner realities that can be explored.
Once you endow these symbols with consciousness, they themselves will have perception, autonomous awareness, and expression. The symbols you create are expressions based on your inner reality, but once these symbols come out they are alive, not dead -- not just an object sitting there. These living things will enrich and create your new inner world.
And when the soul works in the so-called "opposite" direction -- the inward direction -- it strips away all symbols and representations, uses its consciousness in a different way, and learns to explore its own direct experience. When it goes outward, it continually projects new symbols outward from inner reality; when it goes inward, it strips these symbols away one by one. Remember this: in a different way -- you must remember that it is in a different way, not the way you use when going outward. Then it uses its consciousness to learn to explore its own direct experience. Between the soul and experience there is no false symbol, and the soul perfects itself in a kind of value fulfillment. That is something you cannot understand at present -- except through symbolic understanding, you cannot truly feel it; as long as you have consciousness, you cannot understand it at this level.
Whether you are awake or asleep, this effort to "perfect itself in value fulfillment" continues. Some of it you know, some of it you do not. Once you become aware of these activities -- previously you did not know, and now Seth has told you -- you may "catch yourself" at different stages of consciousness. That is to say, at different stages of consciousness you can perceive yourself and experience yourself.
Especially through dreams, you can follow the progress of your own soul perfecting itself. Previously you did not know what your soul wanted to do, did not know what your soul wanted to accomplish; entering this stage, it becomes possible for you -- consciously it is impossible, but especially through dreams -- to follow your own progress, to follow your own development, to follow it in the process of continual perfecting.
The Body as the Most Intimate Symbol
At this very moment, as you follow your own progress, your body is your most intimate and also most obvious symbol.
What does this mean? At the surface level of consciousness, you perceive yourself as a physical body; when you fantasize, you enter a projected body or spirit body; when you truly go out of body or dream, you may appear in the form of a spirit body, but you can still feel that body; when you go deeper, the body gradually disappears and becomes a purely conscious existence.
So when you want to follow your own progress -- and so-called "progress" means which level your consciousness has entered -- your body is your most intimate and most obvious symbol; you only need to observe your own body.
In most stages of consciousness, you will make use of the concept that "you have a body." When we have an out-of-body experience, that spirit body is only slightly less concrete than your physical body -- it is also a relatively very concrete thing, with shape and form. The feeling you have of your own body after leaving it is almost exactly the same as the feeling you have of your body in actual life, except that it cannot move around or touch things in the three-dimensional world. So you are only inside that spirit body, and your consciousness has entered a relatively shallow level, not a deeper level. Through your physical body, you can know what level your consciousness is at.
Later this body is also discarded in turn, and there is a less concrete body. You will find that the body becomes less and less concrete, more and more transparent, less and less distinct -- some people gradually find that they can no longer see their own feet, and can only feel that they exist as a brain alone.
The concept of form is a very important symbol, because your body, your form, your image is a very important symbol, so much so that all your religious literature, or stories related to the afterlife, have always carried it along. So we see that in many mythological stories, whether celestial beings or gods, they all have a form -- it is just that the form may be different from ours, it can float in the sky and shine, but they all have a form.
But at a certain point, form will disappear along with the other symbols. In your terms -- we humans have the concept of time, Seth actually does not -- before this there was a period so far removed from your concepts of reality that only in the most protected areas of sleep did any memory of it ever return.
That is to say, at a certain point of consciousness, at the deepest level, your form and all other symbols disappear together. Your concepts of reality at that stage are so far removed that only by entering the most unconscious level -- the area of sleep that is most protected and cannot be disturbed by the outside world -- can the memory of "body and image disappearing together" possibly return. Beyond that level, you cannot even recall it.
"No-Self" and "Non-Existence"
Is this state the same as what Buddhism often calls the state of "no-self"? It really is. If you have experienced this state, only then will you know that the "self" truly does not exist. But if you have not entered this state, you cannot understand what it means to say "I do not exist" -- you can only have a symbolic, verbal understanding, not the genuine feeling of actually making yourself "disappear."
In your human terms, if there is no existence of symbols, it is not called "existence." So this state is called "non-existence" -- a state without symbols, and for us humans, this thing has never existed. How can you remember something that has never existed?
Think carefully about the things you can remember now: every memory has an image. The blank spots in your memory -- for example, the period of deep sleep after taking a lot of sleeping pills -- that blank period does not exist for you. It is like a person in a vegetative state who wakes up after ten or twenty years; for that person, that period of time never existed, because there is no impression in the mind. Anything that has an image, you can perceive its existence.
Because you are so "attached to forms" -- "attached to forms" is a Buddhist term, meaning clinging to external appearances, illusory appearances, or individual consciousness and thereby deviating from the essence -- you think that a state without "images" is non-existence.
Symbols After Death and the Higher Stages of Consciousness
Those stages of consciousness that occur after death still deal entirely with illusions and with symbols. After death there is heaven and hell, there are beings who receive and guide you, you must review the various scenes of your past lives, learn in the process of reviewing, and you may also go to other systems of probability -- as long as you can see "images," those things are all dealings with symbols.
Although there is much greater freedom in the use of symbols -- no longer limited by the material world -- there is more understanding of the meanings of those symbols. But at the higher stages of consciousness, symbols are no longer needed, and creation occurs entirely without symbols. You must understand this clearly: creation itself does not require symbols.
Although you cannot yet perceive that deep stage of consciousness -- that stage of no self, no form, the so-called "non-existence" -- that is a limitation of being human. But you can record the way symbols appear to you in waking life and in dreams, and learn to connect them with the feelings they represent. Many psychologists are doing this work -- recording dreams, analyzing dreams, analyzing the subconscious.
In most stages of consciousness, you can capture the meaning that a symbol represents. Write these down, and you will learn that at different stages of consciousness -- from the first level to the second, third, fourth, fifth -- certain symbols will appear individually. When that kind of symbol appears, you will know which level of consciousness you are at. These can serve as points of recognition in your own exploration -- you will know where you have arrived, how deep your consciousness has now gone.
Ruburt's Dream Symbols
For example, when Ruburt is about to leave his body in a dream -- that is, when Ruburt's consciousness is about to leave Jane's physical body -- he often finds himself in a strange house or apartment that gives him some opportunity for exploration. He is about to go to another reality space. He will see a strange apartment completely different from ordinary life, and then explore: what is behind this door? Is that room behind there a bathroom or a closet? He may open a door, walk out, and enter another world.
That house is always a different house or apartment, but it is often this kind of strange one with opportunities for exploration. This symbol is always a signpost -- it indicates that you have reached a specific point of consciousness and are ready to enter another stage of consciousness.
Each of you has certain features that are very unique to you and serve the same function. For Ruburt it is a strange house or apartment that can be explored; for you it may be something else -- the interior of a submarine, an unfamiliar ship, an unfamiliar city. But for each person, the symbols are completely different.
Unless you make an effort at self-exploration, you will not understand these symbolic signposts. Some of these symbols will stay with you your whole life; some will change their character during periods of great transition -- during major turning points or emotional fluctuations in your life, these symbols will also change. When these symbols that you are unconsciously familiar with undergo change, it can cause a certain sense of disorientation, because your signposts have changed.
Changes in Symbols and Examples from Daily Life
Similar things also apply to your daily life. He gave an example: perhaps "dog" is for you a natural symbol of joy or freedom, and you feel that way when you see a dog. But one day, you see a dog die a violent death -- hit by a car on the road, covered in blood, dying horribly right under the wheels -- and this "dog" may come to represent something completely different to you. When you think of "dog," you no longer think of joy and freedom as before; you think of a violent death.
This example is obvious, but similar changes in symbols can also happen in dreams. Even if in a dream you see a dog killed in such a bloody way, it will produce the same change in the symbolic meaning of "dog" for you in waking life -- it has the same effect as seeing a dog killed in reality.
A person can symbolize fear with a demon, an unfriendly animal, or even a completely ordinary and harmless object -- it does not have to be a terrifying demon; it could also be a ball, a glass, a mirror. If you understand that this mirror symbolizes fear for you, then you can not only use this knowledge to interpret dreams -- when you dream of a mirror, you know you are now experiencing fear -- but you can also use it as a signpost indicating that you have entered the kind of conscious state in which it often occurs.
The Nature of Symbols and Inner Reality
At different stages of consciousness, symbols will change, and these changes have no logical sequential relationship -- at deeper levels, a mirror may become a transparent wall, become "wind," become an image of "lightning," with no logic at all. But intuitive creation will change symbols -- the very act of your intuitive creation will change symbols, endowing the symbol with different meanings, just like the way a painter changes colors. A painter has no logic; suddenly he wants to change this to that, and the whole tone of the painting changes, and the meaning the painting represents may also change.
All symbols represent inner reality; they come from the inside out. When you juggle symbols back and forth like a juggler, you are playing with and transforming inner reality -- because once your symbols change, the meaning represented by the inner reality will also change accordingly. Any action you express outwardly is caused within the inner environment, or rather within the inner environment you have designed.
Symbols are particles of the psyche, suffused with emotion and meaning. They themselves carry very strong emotion and meaning, and also include those objects with strong attractive and expansive properties. These objects represent inner realizations and realities perceived through direct knowing -- here "direct knowing" refers to immediate cognition and knowing that has not been given form. Although a symbol is a kind of symbol, it is born from that most primitive knowing and perception that has no symbols -- those perceptions, knowledge, and feelings that have no image and no symbol, realized into an image within inner reality. The outer symbol can be replaced and changed, but the inner thing behind it does not change.
Different States of Dreaming
At the various stages of consciousness, symbols also have different expressions. Some seek stability and permanence -- like our matter, which follows the principles and root assumptions of physical reality, with time and space as its root assumptions. Others change much more quickly -- like in dreams, where the surrounding environment and scenes change instantly, and these are more immediate and more sensitive indicators of feelings.
Just as objects appear in the physical environment, the various stages of consciousness also seem to have their own environments in which these symbols appear. The dream universe is just as objective as the material universe -- those seemingly unstable psychic objects in dreams are just as objective as the objects that exist in the three-dimensional world; they are all truly existent. In dreams, objects and symbols are just as faithful representatives of dream life as objects are of waking life.
The nature of symbols can not only indicate the environment you are in -- which level your consciousness is at -- but also the state of consciousness you are in, whether it is a deep level or a shallow level, whether it is shallow consciousness or surface consciousness, or close to unconsciousness.
When you are dreaming normally within the ordinary range of a dream drama -- for example, the dream of the yellow millet, dreaming that you take the imperial examinations, become the top scholar, and live for decades in that great mansion -- the objects in the dream appear constant and unchanging to you; a house is a house. In that state, your orientation is still physical, leaning toward the material, and you project your waking symbols onto the dream images -- the meaning a house has for you in waking life, you carry it into the dream.
But in other states of dream consciousness, deeper states, this house may suddenly disappear, and a modern house may suddenly appear -- you may be living in an old mansion from ancient times, and the mansion will suddenly vanish and become an extremely modern house, leaving you completely bewildered. In this kind of dream environment, "permanence" is no longer a root assumption, and logical sequence does not apply. In an ordinary dream, the house is fixed and unchanging; but in a dream at another level, everything is shifting, and the house suddenly disappears and becomes something entirely new. In these two different dreams, the rules and root assumptions they follow are different.
Symbols that move in this way can be your clues -- the symbol of a house suddenly changing tells you: now you are at another stage of consciousness. You have moved from the inner environment of an ordinary dream into an entirely different inner environment, from one reality into another reality.
In that environment, feelings and experience are not limited to expression through the rigid framework of "matter trapped in sequential moments." Feelings transform automatically, without needing matter, and without needing temporal logic. In a certain sense, the tempo of consciousness speeds up -- the surrounding environment changes in the blink of an eye, and feelings and sensations also change very quickly, unlike our slow three-dimensional world.
In that space, accomplishing something does not require waiting hours or days. Experience is not bound by the category of time -- in real life or in ordinary dreams, gaining a certain experience takes a certain amount of time; you do not experience it instantly. But in that state, an entire book can be written in an instant, and a person's life plan can be thoroughly and carefully examined -- which is to say that this person's entire life can be virtually lived through again in that single instant.
The Multidimensionality of Consciousness and Finding Your Way
This particular stage of consciousness is composed of many dimensions -- composed of many dimensions, not a single one. The time we are in now is one of those dimensions. Therefore, your past, present, and future exist within it. But past, present, and future are only a part of that inner environment -- there is much more!
You must learn to find your way. Just as in the three-dimensional world you need to find your way -- you have GPS, maps, navigation, or you walk the same route many times every day and are very familiar with the scenes -- at the level of consciousness, you also need to learn to find your way. The states of consciousness and their environments are also different; they extend outward in their own ways, at different levels. In different spaces of consciousness, there are different rules and basic principles for different spaces of consciousness; you need to become familiar with them, and you also need to find your way. If you do not find your way, you will get lost in them.
However, by giving yourself appropriate suggestions and hints before sleep, you can do it. Because all these things happen in that deep subconscious level during your sleep -- if you can achieve it through meditation or sitting practice, that is even better; ordinary people can only enter deeper levels of consciousness during sleep. When you give yourself suggestions before sleep, saying "I want to go to such and such a place, I want to do such and such," that is, when exploring toward the unconscious levels, you bring just a little bit of consciousness into your own consciousness. This is somewhat like Inception, where he enters the dream to complete a task and must find a way to return, using different cues -- music, scenes -- to bring him back to the dream level he wants to return to. You can simply understand the dream levels in Inception as different levels of consciousness. In that deepest dream, you may spend three days there while only a few minutes pass in real life. So Inception is not purely an entertainment film; although it is an entertainment film, in the process of entertaining, many directors also want to convey some hints or concepts to you.
The Beginning of Entering the Door
This session ends here. There are still two more sections of content specifically explaining the different stages of consciousness and the meanings that symbols represent within them. This part may be a little difficult, because it has already gone beyond our normal understanding of our own consciousness. But that is all right; this is a beginning. Only when you can truly recognize and clearly understand your own consciousness do you truly begin to enter the door. What you learned before was only a kind of knowledge, a kind of understanding, giving you a basic concept of the whole matter -- it never really touched upon your own analysis and dissection of yourself. Starting from this chapter, it truly tells you how many levels consciousness has and what state your own consciousness is in. When you begin to consciously observe your own consciousness, only then do you gradually begin to feel your way to the door, and only then do you truly begin to have a feeling of "entering the door." So starting from this stage, it is normal for it to have a certain degree of difficulty.
Stages of Consciousness and the Changing of Symbols
We are continuing from the previous session. Last time, we talked about how consciousness has different stages and different levels, and that within different stages, the forms of symbols are also different. At the deepest, most essential stage of consciousness, all symbols disappear, but that stage cannot yet be described using human language and imagination, so let us set that aside for now. On most knowable levels of consciousness, there are always certain symbolic objects or symbolic meanings present. These symbols basically follow you throughout your life -- for example, fire represents warmth, a house represents safety, and these symbols stay with you all along. But symbols are not permanently fixed; when you undergo major turning points and major changes in life, the meanings of these symbols will change.
For example, a house is a very safe and warm place, and there is no problem with that. But suppose one day you witnessed an earthquake and a building collapse, or you encountered a scene such as a haunted house, then the house is no longer a symbol of safety for you. When you are dreaming, or when the thing "house" appears in your deeper consciousness, it is not necessarily a symbol of safety anymore. This is how symbols change.
This session continues from the previous one, which is Session 572 of the book. Let us look at its specific content.
Inner Images While Resting with Eyes Closed
To some extent, these symbolic changes can be perceived at different stages of waking consciousness. While we are awake, consciousness is also in many different stages -- we basically find it very hard to catch them. Sometimes we space out, sometimes we are in a trance, sometimes we daydream, sometimes we seem to enter another time and space for a few seconds -- these are all different stages of consciousness. We mostly cannot catch them. Our consciousness changes through different stages, even while we are awake. But we can basically only perceive the surface consciousness, as if consciousness only exists on this one level, in this one stage.
He gave an example: say you are tired now, tired from work or tired from reading, and you say, I will now close my eyes and rest. Your eyes are closed, but you are still awake. While your eyes are closed and you are still awake, within your inner mind, you can still see things -- it cannot exactly be called seeing, but images and pictures can still appear in your mind. Some are concrete, substantial things, such as images of trees, people, houses; others change in a flash, seeming to flow from one form into another, like a kaleidoscope constantly changing shape. Even those recognizable images are quickly replaced by other images.
When you close your eyes to rest and look inward, countless images will emerge. Some are concrete, some change in a flash, like the images in a kaleidoscope -- you simply cannot catch the pattern of their changes or their meaning. These inner images may seem to you to have no order or logic, and they have no connection with the thoughts you had a moment before closing your eyes to rest, or even an hour before. To some extent, they seem unrelated to you, and not your own -- you also do not know where these images come from, and it seems you did not bring them there yourself.
Session 572
But they often represent characteristics that consciousness displays when it has turned away from worldly stimuli to a greater or lesser degree.
These images more or less represent certain characteristics—when your consciousness no longer focuses on the material world, when you close your eyes and turn inward, your consciousness has actually already entered another level, and these images display the characteristics of consciousness in the process of transition. What are the symbols you see when you open your eyes? It is this three-dimensional world itself, the objects around you—it is also a symbol. The images that appear after you close your eyes are the symbols of that level of consciousness. When the state of consciousness changes, the forms of the symbols change accordingly—this is repeating the point from the previous session.
In this state, the images you see represent the thoughts or feelings you experienced just before you opened your eyes, or the thoughts and feelings that were most important to you a little earlier.
So the images that appear in this state of resting with your eyes closed are not from the period just before you closed your eyes, but from a bit earlier than that—thoughts and feelings that were very important to you, that you had been dwelling on all along. The moment your eyes close, your thoughts and feelings express themselves in this symbolic way—manifesting through the images in your mind.
Because these images seem to have no direct logical connection to these thoughts and feelings, you do not recognize them as your own.
These images are not directly connected to what you are thinking in the way you might expect; they seem unrelated, with no logic to them. Because there is no logical connection, you do not recognize them as your own, nor can you connect them to the meanings they represent.
I am speaking very simply here, because it is difficult to explain in complex terms. The imagined you can express this feeling more freely than the actual you.
The imagined you—that is, the image that appears when you close your eyes, or a kind of imagination or fantasy you have about yourself, such as something I did, something I should go do, what the consequences would be if I did that—this imagined you generally has a greater sense of freedom and expression than the actual you, because it is not in the three-dimensional world; it is imagined.
He gave an example: a particular fear felt earlier in the day, for instance the fear of "losing your job"—now because of the pandemic, every department and every company is laying people off; whether in China, America, or anywhere else in the world, everyone is caught in this wave of unemployment. You do not know where you will work next, and all of this makes you afraid. This fear of losing your job is a feeling and thought within you, but when you close your eyes, it may be translated into a string of seemingly unrelated symbols, becoming a series of images. These images and symbols have no surface connection to your fear of unemployment, so you do not recognize them.
You might see a deep hole in the ground; it might be replaced by a street urchin who is obviously poor and from another world; a coffin might appear; or a black wallet flying through the air; you might also see a bitterly cold, dark winter landscape; or a character from an old book long forgotten, who may appear and disappear. Among these images there may be a pile of opposite symbols representing your hopes—a spring flower, a table full of food, a new set of clothes, any sign that means "abundance" to you.
When you have a fear of losing your job, you actually still have fantasies about the future, still hoping to find a new job, for new opportunities to appear. So among these symbols there will also appear some opposite symbols representing "abundance." But the thought of "losing your job" itself never appears at all, as if you had already forgotten it. Although these images are all connected to your inner fear of unemployment, on the surface there is no logical relationship between them.
But through the use of this symbolism, your emotions are given full play. Each image rises and falls in the pool of emotion, following the emotions hidden beneath consciousness, of which you are entirely unaware.
Your fear of unemployment involves tremendous emotional ups and downs—fear on the one hand, and on the other, not having completely lost hope for the future. These emotional rises and falls take place beneath your consciousness, in a state you cannot perceive at all. On the surface you appear very calm, without a ripple, but inside you are already surging with waves, and this "surging" is something your consciousness cannot detect. So some people, under a deep, vaguely felt fear such as this fear of unemployment, will feel for a long period of time that their mind is very unsettled, very restless, very unstable, yet without any definite feeling—they cannot sense the precise emotion. In fact, great changes have already taken place within them.
Those symbolic images are simply a way in which emotion expresses itself.
In any case, they automatically attract these images.
It is those emotions that automatically attract these images. Through introspection, through inward observation, you can observe the source of these images and discover that they have a certain connectedness—they come from your emotions, from the rises and falls of your emotions. But we generally do not do this, so it gets overlooked. We only feel that lately our mind is very unsettled, very restless, unable to concentrate on anything.
Deepening of Consciousness: From Vision to Smell and Touch
If you let yourself lie with your eyes closed for a longer time, this symbol will continue to change its characteristics. Those images begin to lose some of their visual features and become intensified in other directions -- for example, you might smell a particular odor you dislike, which means it has become intensified in the olfactory sense. Conversely, you could also translate the fear into a horrifying bodily sensation.
When you close your eyes and lie there for a longer time, that is, when consciousness enters a deeper level, it may no longer be just a display of visual images, but will turn into olfactory or bodily tactile sensations. For example, you might suddenly feel cold, your whole body tightening up, feeling very uncomfortable, or you might suddenly feel as if you are falling -- this sensation also occurs in dreams or when half asleep, the body suddenly dropping downward; or something you dislike touches you -- many people dislike caterpillars, snakes, lizards, and you might feel these things touching you, making you extremely disgusted and fearful. That is to say, when your consciousness enters another level, the symbols also change, no longer being image-based symbols.
These constantly changing characteristics of the symbol should alert you to the fact that your state of consciousness has changed.
The previous section already said that you must pay attention at all times to these changes in the nature of the symbols. When the symbol changes from a visual image to smell, touch, or a bodily reaction, it is letting you know: your state of consciousness has already shifted from the shallow level just now into a deeper level.
If here you let yourself drift into sleep, you will most likely create two or three dreams symbolizing this fear.
If you are very tired at this point and do not want to get up, and you go into sleep from here, you will have this kind of dream, considering and trying possible solutions within the scope of the dream. Dreams are not useless; they do not only bring you fear. In dreams they will give you solutions. Of course, the matter of "unemployment" may never appear in any dream in its original form. In a dream you might go to the supermarket to buy things and find that everything in the supermarket is gone, and nothing you wanted to buy is there; or some people might feel that they cannot find their car in the parking lot, the car is lost, disappeared -- all kinds of fears, which on the surface all seem unrelated to unemployment. But you must understand that this is a symbolic display.
When entering a deeper level, this is something your conscious feelings do not know, but for your unconscious, this issue has already been established -- the matter of "possible unemployment" has already been recognized as a problem that needs to be solved, and has been handed over to the unconscious for processing. The unconscious has already received the information passed down from the conscious level.
In the following deep, protected areas of sleep.
Do these several states correspond to the first level, second level, and third level of consciousness mentioned in the previous section? We have now entered the fourth level. At this level, your inner self and those higher centers within the inner self are permitted to play their role. Those more advanced, multidimensional "yous" -- the intuitive centers, the perceptive centers, the centers of probability, the centers of choice -- we will not go into specifics for now; they begin to play their role.
The portion of the personality that comes to the aid of the three-dimensional orientation.
The portion of the personality with three-dimensional orientation is our physical life, our life in this three-dimensional world. In other words, it solves the problems in your real life. You have many levels; you are a multidimensional being, and at the same time you also have a "you" in the three-dimensional world. At this time, the higher-dimensional self comes to help the three-dimensional you. Now you know that someone has always been helping you.
This more liberated self sees the situation much more clearly.
Why? Because it stands at a higher dimension, so of course it sees very clearly. You are trapped within the limitations of time and space, able to see only what is before your eyes or what happened in the past, and know nothing of the future. It is not like that -- at a higher level, it has insight into the future, knows the past, knows your abilities, knows all of it. So it sees much more clearly than you do.
It suggests certain courses of action, but does not give orders to act.
It will give you suggestions, but not by issuing commands to your brain saying "tomorrow morning when you get up you must do such and such, you must leave this city and go to another city to look for work" -- it will not give you commands, and your brain can never receive such instructions. It does not give them to you in the form of commands, but tells you through the you that is dreaming.
After it gives this suggestion to the dreaming you, how can you take action when you are awake? The dreaming self then manufactures a group of dreams -- remember, a group of dreams, not one dream. Why a group of dreams? Because there are many suggestions. In this group of dreams, it uses a symbolic dream scenario to illustrate this solution -- that is, the solution to your problem of "possible unemployment."
A Complete Flow of Consciousness
At this point you understand. From the most surface level of consciousness—you are worried about losing your job—to the point where you feel too tired, you do not want to think about this matter anymore, you think until your head hurts and still cannot come up with a solution, so you close your eyes. During inner observation, some images come out: a bleak and miserable winter, a poor child, and so on, and of course there may also be opposite ones—a bountiful dinner or new clothes—and there is contradiction in the middle. Then after entering a deeper level, these images will turn into taste, smell, hearing, or touch, into bodily reactions. At this level you may still not know what is going on. Then it will continue to go downward, you begin to dream, you fall asleep, and you enter yet another new level. In this sleeping stage, you will have some dreams, dreams with plots and with things in them, but the plots of the dreams actually have no connection with the matter itself.
When you reach the dream level, consciousness will continue to go downward, and at your unconscious level, this problem must be dealt with—hand the problem over to your unconscious to work on. Your inner self solves this problem at this unconscious level, because the inner self itself exists in a multidimensional space, stands high and sees far, and based on your present situation it gives you a solution or a suggestion. But these suggestions are not given to you in the form of clear instructions; rather, they are transmitted through dreams, to the you who is dreaming. It creates a string of dreams, and within this string of dreams, through a symbolic scene or meaning, it tells you how to resolve this matter.
So you see, consciousness goes from the most surface level all the way down to the deepest unconscious level, descending layer by layer, and ultimately gives you a way to solve it.
A Real Dream Example
When I saw this part, I happened to see a news story today. There was a person in China whose child was abducted by human traffickers in 20077. But the night before the abduction, he had a very clear dream: he dreamed that the whole family was eating at home as usual, and the child's grandmother asked, "Where has my grandson gone?" In the dream, he said very casually, "He was taken away by someone." No one else seemed surprised, and he himself was not surprised either. He just said it casually, and then everyone went on eating and doing whatever they were doing. He thought, oh, how strange is that? Then the next day at 7:50 in the evening, his child was abducted.
This is a very interesting event. I happened to see this while reading this part, so I thought I would share it with everyone. So dreams will give you certain hints—if you understand the hint, you will know what to do; if you do not understand it, you may just think it is a nonsensical dream.
Near the end of the dream, a final and more specific interpretation is made.
It gives you a series of dreams, and you may not remember all of them—you may only remember a few. When you are about to wake up, it gives you the final, more specific interpretation, and the symbols become increasingly clear—no longer so vague or obscure. Just like the dream I mentioned, the dream he remembered when he was about to wake up was already very clear: the child might be abducted. It essentially took a fact and expressed it clearly through the way of a family discussing at the dinner table where the child had gone—and during the meal the child was not at the table, which is why the grandmother asked where her grandson was.
At this point, however, the symbol is extremely narrow in its operation.
The symbols become increasingly clear, but the function of the symbol becomes extremely narrow. The more clearly it speaks, the less you can feel the solution it offers—it is very narrow. That is, you know the symbol and can feel that the symbol is very clear, but the help it can give you becomes increasingly narrow.
The closer you come to waking consciousness, the more limited and narrow the symbol becomes.
When you obtain a solution from multidimensional space, as you return more and more clearly to the conscious level, the solution becomes increasingly narrow for you—the actions you can take and the hints you can be given become narrower and narrower.
In any given physical environment, the more readily available a symbol is, the less value it has.
In other words, when you are awake, the environment around us is all our symbols. The cup you see when you open your eyes, the water you drink, the food you eat today, the people and events you encounter—these are all symbols of consciousness at the surface level. The deep level has deep-level symbols, and the surface level has surface-level symbols. Surface-level symbols you understand at a glance—a cup is a cup, does that even need to be said? But the truly valuable meaning this symbol can bring you becomes less and less. Only the solution given to you at the deepest level, in multidimensional space, in deep-level dreams, is valuable to you.
Take the example just now: he dreamed that his child was abducted, but there was no solution—he did not know what to do, and it did not tell him what to do. And because it was too clear, so clear that it seemed like a joke, he did not take it seriously. When consciousness unfolds layer by layer from the deepest level, the symbols become increasingly obvious and increasingly narrowed. When the symbols become more obvious and more narrowed, their function and meaning become less. Reflected in the three-dimensional world, you may only hear a fragment: a stranger says a single sentence, or a news story you watch says a certain sentence, and it is about this very matter. For example, at that moment you are watching CCTV's "Legal Report," and it may be showing a story about child trafficking. To you, this may just be a television program you see during a normal lunch, having nothing to do with your life—but in fact, all this information comes from the deepest-level symbols, except that the closer it gets to the surface, the more explicit and manifested its function and meaning become, and the less its function is.
Why This Material Feels Hard to Understand
A lot of what Seth has been exploring from the last session to this one, for people of our time: first, you may feel it has little to do with you; second, you may find it rather hard to understand, as if the difficulty is starting to ramp up. The reason is that we humans have rarely explored this territory at the level involved. In psychology and in dream research we seem to know quite a lot, and many specialists are studying it, but when it comes to the inner mechanism, the inner workings, the operating principles, we really know nothing at all. We always treat dreams as leftovers from daytime brain activity, residual information, a disorderly patchwork -- that is how we think of dreams.
So this knowledge is being heard for the first time by everyone, and you will feel a sense of distance from it, no sense of familiarity, no sense of having experienced it yourself, because it is not that clear-cut. But I believe there are some readers or listeners who, if something similar has happened around them, will understand very clearly what Seth is talking about. This is something only people who have personally experienced it can understand; those who have not will think: what is he even talking about? What do you mean, getting narrower and narrower? It is unclear.
When you reflect on your dreams, when you take past events and turn them over in your mind again, you will discover some traces and clues.
This part may be a bit difficult, but I hope everyone can grit their teeth and keep going, because this is a very crucial point. In many religions and many fields of scholarship, people have actually wanted to explore this question, but they have never been able to explore it clearly, never given a clear and explicit account -- they only "know that it is so, but not why it is so," or "know only one aspect, not the other," knowing only the surface, not the inner cause. Seth, through giving examples in this plain and straightforward way, tells you over and over: consciousness has many, many levels. What we humans currently observe is only the outermost, most superficial surface consciousness or explicit consciousness; we have some awareness of the levels behind it, but we understand little and have studied little.
The More Precise a Symbol Is, the Less Meaning It Carries
To some extent, the more precise a symbol is, the less meaning it can contain.
This is still repeating what was said earlier.
In the most important dreams that occur during protected deep sleep, the symbols are strong enough and yet condensed enough that they can be broken down.
At the deepest level of consciousness, which we hypothesize and call the fifth level of consciousness, in the most important dreams that occur there, the symbols are strong enough, very clear, and also condensed enough that they can be broken down -- a condensed symbol can be diluted and broken down into a series of seemingly unrelated dreams.
As a connecting link, this condensed symbol can be broken down into a series of dreams, and can then retain their original power while still appearing in different guises.
It retains the strength and energy of that most original symbol of the solution, only it appears in different guises. Then in each subsequent dream, by the time it reaches the dream level, the imagery becomes clearer and clearer. A deep-level dream, by the time it becomes the dream you can finally remember, has already been interpreted quite clearly.
While you are busy living your life, your consciousness is also fluctuating. If you develop the habit of observing your mental states without interpreting them...
If you have this kind of habit: observing your own mental states -- that is, the activity of your consciousness, its levels, and the symbolic things it presents -- but without interpreting them, without adding your own judgments and explanations. Why? Because the moment you explain or interpret, it becomes limited by you, narrowed; the original meaning it represents becomes narrower and more defined. Just observe, but do not interpret -- do not think about what this image or scene means or represents, because that is only a symbol, and the underlying thing behind it you have not yet become aware of.
You can catch yourself manufacturing symbols in this way, and you will catch yourself creating symbols at different levels of consciousness.
You need to know where the source is that manufactures the symbol behind that symbol.
Every physical event you encounter is stored in your psyche in a categorized manner, becoming a set of definite symbols.
That is, all the things you have experienced, every single one, are stored within your psyche -- be sure to remember, within the psyche -- categorized into different groups of symbols: there are symbols of joy, symbols of sorrow, symbols of heartbreak, symbols of happiness, symbols of pain, symbols of fear. Every three-dimensional world event you experience is categorized within your psyche and becomes a kind of symbol.
These symbols do not represent these experiences; they contain these experiences.
The categorized symbols do not represent the experience itself -- a symbol is a symbol, it is not the experience itself, but it contains these experiences. This sentence itself is very worth considering. For example, when you see a spring flower, that is a symbol, and it contains many, many experiences; it does not represent any single experience itself.
In terms of your present life, these represent your personal "symbol bank."
Every thing you have experienced -- from childhood to adulthood, some of which you may not even remember, things you forgot after experiencing them -- every thing is stored in the form of a symbol, categorized. All these stored symbols are like a symbol bank.
There is great unity between your daytime symbols and your dream symbols.
"Daytime" refers to the three-dimensional world. The symbols you have when awake and when dreaming have great unity. What does "great unity" mean? It means the house you see in a dream and the house you see in the daytime are the same symbol to you, with the same symbolic meaning. In the daytime you encounter clear skies, brilliant sunshine, a spring breeze on your face; in a dream you dream of the same feeling, the same scene, and the symbols they give you are all the same.
Of course, many symbols can, in a kind of magical "shorthand" way, carry far more than one experience, so that one symbol will evoke not just one specific experience, but also includes those similar experiences.
One symbol carries many experiences; similar experiences of the same kind all exist within this one symbol.
Therefore your personal symbol bank involves a great many personal associations.
Because one experience brings up many similar experiences, one symbol may evoke all the similar experiences associated with it. Within this symbol bank, they are all linked together.
And this bank operates in the dream state exactly as it does in the waking state, but with greater freedom.
When dreaming, the way this symbol bank operates is exactly the same as when you are awake -- you can withdraw symbols from it, and the meaning of symbols in dreams is the same as the meaning of symbols when you are awake. But in dreams there is greater freedom.
And in your terms, during sleep, we operate this symbol bank not only by withdrawing from past events, but also by withdrawing from the future.
Why? Because in dreams there are no limitations of time and space. Things that have not happened in the future -- your dreams know about them. Your inner self, your soul, can see all the possible things that may happen in the future. Those things that you in your present three-dimensional world consider not to have happened yet have actually already been experienced at the level of your inner self's soul. If you know that it is "simultaneous" -- past, present, and future happen at the same time -- then you can understand that the "inner self," whether you call it "soul" or "personality," has already experienced, or is currently experiencing, those things that have not yet happened in your future. So it can not only withdraw from past events in the symbol bank -- every time something happens, a symbol is deposited, and similar ones are grouped with similar ones -- it can also withdraw from the future.
So that is why in dreams it can give you solutions, now you understand, right? It is said that in the dream state, you use more symbols, not just the symbols from waking life and the past; in dreams you can also draw upon symbols from the future.
Because you perceive symbols of the past and the future, the intensity of these symbols is different, and usually they cluster together.
Be sure to remember, the intensity of symbols is not the same, but they cluster together -- symbols of the same kind will cluster together.
Now this multidimensional symbol will appear in many ways, and not only as visible images.
In multidimensional space, this symbol itself is multidimensional. It is not like a symbol in the three-dimensional world, which is a specific event or a specific thing within time and eventuality. Symbols in multidimensional space will appear in many ways, not only as visible images.
They will affect not only your own physical reality, but also all the realities in which you are involved.
Just as was said in Chapter Sixteen about the "system of probabilities," you are not only in this three-dimensional world; you are also in many dimensional worlds -- some are physical worlds, some are nonphysical -- and you participate in a corner of each. Those symbols in deep dreams affect not only the three-dimensional world you can know, but all the worlds in which you are involved.
In a certain manner, the symbols that you know are merely the tail ends of greater symbols.
From a certain perspective, the symbols we see are only the tail end of a larger multidimensional symbol that we are able to capture in three-dimensional space. The true symbol still lies behind this tail end.
The Symbol Bank Must Be Activated
When I speak of this "personal symbol bank" of yours, I mean to point out one thing.
Why is it called a "personal symbol bank"? Because all the things you have experienced are stored in this bank. This bank is yours -- because those experienced things are personal to you, including things experienced in different dimensional spaces, which are also personal to you. This bank is not just the storage of all your experiences after being born in this life; it also includes the symbols from your previous lives before this one -- for you, it contains all the symbols of your past lives; in this life, you then deposit this life's experiences into it. This bank is personal to you.
This symbol bank must be activated.
You must remember this, mark it as important. The word "activated" must be underlined. The bank sits there, storing symbols and the meanings of symbols, but it must be activated. It gives an example to explain what "activated" means, and this example is very good -- you must remember it. When you don't understand what "symbols being activated" means, think of this example and you will understand.
When you were born, during the process of delivery through the birth canal from your mother's womb, you had visual images, but these were inner visual images -- when you were delivered from the mother's body, there was an image in that infant's mind, an inner image. Remember, it must be inner. Then when you first opened your eyes, the very first time in your life that you opened your eyes, in that instant, the symbol that was activated was your most primal, that inner visual image. These are the mechanisms of learning -- we previously did not know how we learned; this is how we learn.
You try again and again to use your eyes correctly, until the outer image matches the inner pattern.
When a newborn baby first opens its eyes, the eyes are like an instrument of ours -- for the soul of a newborn baby, the eyes are like its camera, its video camera. It must use these eyes until what the eyes see, the image reflected in the mind through the retina, comes into agreement with the image in the heart.
This point is extremely important, and our scientists still do not know it -- how we learn, how vision is formed; there are many theories, but we still do not understand it to this day. Seth explains it clearly in one sentence: your vision is the result of the coordination and unification of inner images and outer images.
We all know a basic fact of physics: the things our eyes see are actually inverted. According to the principle of the pinhole camera8, the image formed on our retina is upside down -- just like the most primitive camera. So why do we humans see things right side up? Scientists have done experiments: they gave people special glasses that inverted the image9. At first the subjects felt the world was upside down, but after wearing the glasses and living with them for a period of time, gradually adjusting -- a strange thing happened: after a while, the image automatically turned right side up again. Scientists discovered that the human brain has a process of "error correction" or "rectification" in the visual system, constantly comparing and contrasting with the three-dimensional world, and then finding a correct way of expressing the images obtained by your eyes. After the glasses were removed, the image became inverted again, but after a while it returned to normal. This is the same principle as the dancing girl I showed you in the final video of The Fourth Dimension -- whether she is spinning to the left or to the right. The human brain is extremely strong in vision and has a self-compensating inner function.
What Seth tells you is this: there is an inner image. In other words, when you see whether that girl is spinning left or right, there is an inner image in your mind -- if you think she is spinning left, she spins left; if you think she is spinning right, she spins right. The image in your mind and the image you see must be coordinated, unified, and brought into agreement.
This is a typical example of "activation." Just like when you first saw things with your eyes, there had to be a mobilization between the inner image and the outer image, and then a process of reaching agreement.
Many people can recall -- people under deep hypnosis, or people who enter certain states, near-death states -- sometimes they can recall the process of being delivered from the mother's body, with a very clear sense of imagery. Actually, we know that at that time the infant's eyes cannot see at all -- first of all, it is pitch black, and secondly, during the delivery process the eyes cannot possibly see anything; only after being born can they see. But the person can see the visual image of being pushed out through the birth canal, with clear memory, and the feeling and the image are together. How could he see that image? Unless his eyes were on top of his head, and open, and there was light. So you can understand that during the process of your birth, although it was your first birth, that inner image already existed, right there in your symbol bank. This symbol bank needed your first opening of the eyes to activate it -- your retina was stimulated, visual signals were transmitted to the brain, and only then was that primal inner image in the symbol bank mobilized.
The "opening of the eyes" activated the inner mechanism.
The "opening of the eyes" is in quotation marks, meaning it does not refer to the action itself, but to the fact that this event activated the inner mechanism.
If the eyes themselves have some defect, for example if the person was born blind, then this specific mechanism was not activated.
If the eyes are blind from birth, then the mechanism of "activation" during the birth process was not started.
This person, for his own reasons, may have chosen to be born blind.
As we said earlier, in the process of choosing the next life after death, he may have chosen to be a blind person. If these reasons change -- for example, he no longer wants to be blind, he has had new inner development, inner psychic development has occurred -- then the physical eyes will be healed, and the inner mechanism will also be activated.
When a person's psyche develops to a certain degree, and he truly wants to trigger and activate this mechanism, his eyes will get better. Why? Because this activating mechanism has been started again. All the image records stored in the inner symbol bank are all there -- all the records of your past lives are there. Although you have never seen anything in this life, the images of your past lives are all stored in the symbol bank. There are many such cases -- changes of this kind are too numerous to count. You will often find that some people's eyes suddenly get better in a particular state; such things happen in the world, and a blind person is cured.
But the inner symbol bank is like a withdrawal account; unless you make a withdrawal, it will not function.
All those inner symbols are there, but you must activate them. If you do not activate them, they will not function -- just like the money in a bank account: if you do not withdraw it, it will not come out of the ATM by itself. You must have an action like inserting the card and entering the password to activate it.
As I mentioned earlier in this book, you learned to think before you learned language. But at the "psychic" tips of your fingers, you already have the experience of past lives to guide you.
Before you went to school, before you learned writing, pinyin, or the alphabet, you could already think. After you learned, you found that our thinking cannot be separated from words and is closely tied to language. But when you had no words and no language, you could think, and you could also speak.
Some people say that speaking is taught by the mother. Think carefully: from the time a child is born until he can speak fluently, the mother did teach some, and the father taught some too, but how much did they teach? Did they really give the child lessons? Did they systematically, step by step, run classes for him? Did they provide systematic instruction so that he could speak fluently? It seems not. You would teach him to say "eat eat," "sleep sleep," "this is an apple," giving him some basic things. But when was that? How did you teach him then? Those flashcards, those literacy cards -- that was all later, when he was older and could already read. What about before that? Which parent has truly, systematically taught an infant? Did you teach him to think? Did you teach him how to think about problems?
Every mother, every parent, think about how you yourself taught your child. To put it bluntly and a bit harshly, you basically just played with him like a pet, talked to him, chatted with him. You talk to cats and dogs the same way; you may talk to him a little more than to them, but the amount more is absolutely not much more than with cats and dogs, not a qualitative change. But why can't your cat or dog speak? Why can't they think? If it were you who taught them, then try teaching a kitten or puppy from the time it knows nothing -- teach a kitten or puppy to say one sentence and let me see. Of course, I don't mean to argue with everyone; what I mean is: the thinking and language that this little baby learns is not just taught by you. What you teach plays a partial role, a guiding role -- just like when his eyes see things, it is an external facilitating effect, equivalent to a catalytic effect, an activating effect. But the most important thing is that this activating effect activated the stock, the deposits, in his inner symbol bank.
For example, a person who is born twice in succession in the same country will speak much more quickly the second time.
We find that some children speak early; at one year old or even before one, they can already say some basic words; at just over one year old they are already quite fluent; at two years old they are basically no different from a normal person. But some children only start speaking at two; before that they never speak, and the parents are very anxious, saying, why doesn't my baby speak -- other people's children are all speaking, but he just won't open his mouth. But whatever you ask him, he understands; whatever you say to him, he can understand; he just won't open his mouth.
If a person reincarnates consecutively in the same country, he will speak quickly the second time. Otherwise he will be slow, because some infants are coming to this country for the first time, and before learning the new language, they will think in the language of the previous life. For example, if a Dane reincarnates into China, at first when he is thinking about problems and considering things, he uses the Danish way. At this time, if you give him some external stimulation in Chinese or English, it can gradually activate the memories of an even earlier life. If not, he will still learn, but the learning process is not what you think -- the little baby does not learn while awake, but learns while sleeping.
He practices repeatedly while sleeping. Including walking -- when he toddles, it is not all learned during the few steps taken while awake. One day he suddenly holds onto the wall, or pushes away the baby walker, and starts to toddle along -- and this process has already appeared countless times in this little baby's dreams. He has stood up and walked in his dreams countless times; in his dreams he has practiced countless times. Every sentence he speaks, every word of his babbling, he has practiced countless times in his dreams. So in real life, you see him begin to speak. Now you understand: it is not only learned while awake.
All of this is connected with the use of symbols.
Sound Itself Is a Symbol
This next part is also a bit hard to understand. He says sound itself is a symbol, which is quite normal. When you realize—for example, there is a "point of stillness," and sound begins to grow quieter and quieter. For instance, when I am lecturing, there are pauses. If you look at the waveform of that pause with software, this segment is silent, with no sound. It is from this point that sound begins to grow louder. But what you do not understand is this: from that same "point of stillness"—that is your "non-perceiving point"—that is, this interval, this gap in the middle of the sound.
We can only hear the sound of speech, and we feel that this sound is perceivable; the paused parts in between, you do not perceive, and you feel they are empty, blank. But sound arises from this state of no sound, and then returns to the state of no sound and stops. Sound is rhythmic, it is intermittent.
yet it still has meaning, and has just as much variation as the sound you know.
In those places where there is no sound, you think there is nothing at all—just a flat line at zero decibels. But Seth says that within that gap where you cannot hear sound, there is still just as much variation as in your sound, and these are all symbols as well.
Unspoken thoughts have a sound that you cannot hear.
Are not the words we speak an expression of our thoughts? An expression of the ideas in our minds. But if you think carefully, actually your mind never thinks about how you are going to say these words; they simply flow out naturally. And behind this thought that flows out naturally, there is something even deeper—it is a symbol. The words we speak, this sound, is a symbol; it is the symbol of thought. This "thought" is the substance behind the symbol of language.
But do you think language has spoken all of your thoughts? It only speaks a part of them. Your thoughts are extremely rich; language can only express a part. Where are those unexpressed thoughts? They are in those blank places you cannot see or hear. They also carry the symbols of your thoughts—perhaps those things that were not spoken. This is very interesting, very subtle.
but on another level of reality and perception, it sounds very clear and true.
If we open the inner senses, or have telepathy or other abilities, those thoughts that were not expressed through words—you will find they are equally clear and true.
What does this feel like? For example, suppose you read a classic Buddhist sutra, or read another classic text, such as the Tao Te Ching10. You get no feeling from this text at all; you cannot understand it, cannot grasp it. But then one day—perhaps not exactly "suddenly," but after a period of study, of spiritual improvement—you find that you understand that sentence. You grasp the feeling beneath the words. And then that joy—in religion this joy is called "dharma joy," the joy of understanding this, of sudden realization, of "having the ambrosia poured on your head"—that emotion overflows. It is as if you have grasped something beyond the words, things that were not expressed through language.
Many people have this feeling. A couple of days ago in a group chat, someone said that the first time he listened to my videos he could not stand them at all; he found them long-winded and nagging, did not know what they were talking about, had no feeling, and just set them aside and did not want to listen. But after more than a month, he was arrested by the police for drunk driving. This person was very honest, and told the police, I have been drinking, I really have been drinking, so do whatever needs to be done. The police saw he was very honest, so they locked him in the police station for one night, and released him once he sobered up. During the process of being held to sober up, he sat there meditating; he was held for about twelve hours. He had mostly sobered up, but was half drunk and half awake and could not sleep, so he meditated. The next day the police released him, and he was quite grateful to the police. After he got home, he opened his phone or computer, and one of my videos popped up again—perhaps in a place he had watched before, or somewhere related, another one of my videos appeared. At that moment he opened the video, and he said that in that instant he understood everything. That "understanding" was not just that he understood what you were saying—he completely knew what you were thinking, what you wanted to say. At that moment he felt as if he suddenly understood what Seth wanted to say.
What I mean is this: the same sound, the same content—sometimes you cannot grasp at all the thought it is trying to convey. You can only hear the sound—the waveform, the highs and lows, the level—but what the sound is trying to convey is the thought behind it. Sound is only a symbol; whether you can get the thought behind it is the key. This is a typical experience.
So how can you see the symbol behind the sound? I do not have any better method either. My feeling, for example, when I read the Seth material—Seth Speaks is relatively simple, but with much more complex material, I am just like everyone else: I cannot understand what he is trying to say. I can understand every word, every sentence, every paragraph, but I just do not know what he is trying to say. I will often read it over and over; if I cannot understand it, I put it down, wait a day or two, or first do something else. After a while I come back and read it again, and maybe I still cannot quite understand it. You do not need to be anxious; put it down, and look at it again later. And in the process of reading, you have to imagine what he is trying to say—boldly imagine whether he might mean this or that, and then fit what you imagined into it, and see whether the surrounding context is speaking in the way you imagined. Then you find your guess was wrong; that is not what he meant. Then wait a while, and if a new inspiration comes, try another guess.
This can be illustrated with examples from daily life—this is called mobilizing your symbols. These are all your symbol bank, your life experience. You have to mobilize it, activate it, use your symbol bank to think about whether this passage is trying to say this meaning, whether it is talking about that kind of experience, whether it is a life experience I once had, or something I once heard about. In this way, repeatedly, again and again, you stir it and pull at it. In this process, my feeling is this: when you have read it several times—three, four, five, six times, not necessarily any fixed number—but when you reach a certain reading, you suddenly have a feeling of "sudden realization." That "sudden realization" is not like the "ambrosia poured on your head" kind of instant enlightenment you imagine; it is a gradual process. But when this "gradual" accumulation reaches a certain point, quantitative change produces qualitative change, and you will understand what he is trying to say in this whole passage, this whole chapter, or this whole session.
And the things he is saying are already stated very clearly in the words, yet before this you simply could not understand them. That is the thought behind the words. Words are a symbol, language is also a symbol—what is the thought behind them? This is a typical example.
Why do many people say that reading the book is very hard to understand, but listening to my explanations is easy to understand? Because my explanations use the mode of language plus my own understanding, and language itself has rhythm and is intermittent. Even when I read the original text aloud, I read it this way, but my rhythm and those unspoken, silent blank places in between—that rhythm also carries meaning, carries thought. It is another mode of expression of thought. Written words are far inferior to spoken language, because they have no rhythm. Words come in strings, with no gaps in between; we use punctuation marks as gaps. Why are punctuation marks important? Because they represent gaps. But when we speak, we do not read the punctuation marks aloud. Even if I do not read the punctuation marks, the rhythm of the language and the pauses in between also represent those punctuation marks, and they carry even more meaning than the punctuation marks. That is why you can hear sound from these silent places.
This is the meaning of that sentence: on another level, it sounds very clear and true. There is nothing mysterious or occult about this; you do not necessarily need to open the third eye or the sixth sense. You yourself already possess this capacity for understanding; it is only a matter of whether your focus is there, whether you are focused on this question, whether you are constantly stirring the bank of your inner reality, whether you are using it.
The Sound of a Tree
Let us continue with the last short passage of this session.
Furthermore, the tree standing there is also a sound that you do not perceive.
A tree stands there quietly. You can only see its form, but you cannot perceive its sound.
In dreams, especially those beyond recall, these sounds are automatically perceived there and translated into visual images.
In those dreams you cannot remember, that is, on the deeper levels of consciousness, there are certain areas of consciousness where the sound emitted by that tree can automatically be perceived by you, and then in the dream it becomes the image of the tree.
What does he mean? For example, there is a tree outside the room where you sleep. This tree is something with form, but it actually emits sound — this sound cannot be sensed while you are awake, nor can it be sensed in the subconscious or in fantasy, nor can it be sensed in the dreams you do have — the tree in your dreams does not have sound. But in those dreams you cannot remember, that is, in dreams on the deeper level of consciousness, your perceptual system can perceive the sound emitted by this tree, and then translate the sound into a form or image signal, which appears in that dream. It is just that you cannot remember that dream. But in that dream, there really is a tree, and that tree is the sound emitted by the tree next to you while you sleep, translated through your inner perceptual system into a tree.
They serve, therefore, as a kind of shorthand.
These sounds serve as a kind of "shorthand" — quick notations.
Given certain sounds, you could recreate your universe as you unconsciously create it, and as you unconsciously know it.
If you were given certain sounds, you could recreate your universe — just as we create the image of a tree in the unconsciousness of dreaming. The tree itself emits sound, but you cannot sense it. On your unconscious level you can perceive it, and then in the dream you turn it into the image of a tree. If you were given certain sounds, you could also turn them into a trigger or starting point for creating your universe — sound can become image, and it can also become your universe. Because in that unconscious dream, it has already become your image, your universe.
Any one multidimensional symbol can contain all of the reality that you know.
This statement is spoken on a very grand, very magnificent scale. What does it mean? Any one multidimensional symbol — it must be multidimensional, not a symbol of the three-dimensional world; the tables and stools of the three-dimensional world are symbols of the three-dimensional world — within this multidimensional, multi-temporal symbol, in the unconscious part at the deepest level of consciousness, on that level already approaching "no-self," any one multidimensional symbol contains all of the reality that you know. This symbol may be just a single musical note, or a painting, or a multidimensional symbol that cannot be described in language, but it contains all the worlds related to you. One symbol contains everything.
If you do not understand this statement, think of the Buddhist saying "one grain of sand contains one world." What does "one grain of sand contains one world" mean? Is this not an excellent elaboration of it? If you regard this one grain of sand as a symbol of a multidimensional world, then within this one grain of sand is contained the entire world.
As for the reflections that follow, everyone can go and think about it: what does "one grain of sand contains one world" mean. Regarding the different levels of consciousness, we will stop here for the second part of the Chapter 18 commentary. There is still another section ahead to continue exploring more levels of consciousness.
The Alpha State and Patty's Visit
This is the third and final part of the commentary on Chapter 18 of Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul, corresponding to Session 573. This part continues to explore the different levels of consciousness, that is, the different stages of consciousness.
Before the main text, there is a description of the scene: Patty was present at the time. She had driven from Ottawa, Canada, to Elmira to attend Jane's ESP class. Jane always had an ESP class, that is, an extrasensory perception training class. In September 1970, while Jane was on a promotional tour for The Seth Material, she met Patty in Philadelphia. Today Patty told Jane about her research on "conditioning training" using a simple yoga-like technique. Patty was studying this conditioning training under the supervision of a brainwave current meter, which is basically similar to an EEG machine. She learned to "turn on" her alpha brainwaves, and then the alpha waves would show up on the computer at the brainwave level. This allowed her to reach a certain state of relaxed awareness, in which perception and feeling—perception is your state of consciousness, and feeling is a deeper layer, equivalent to a kind of inner feeling of pure consciousness. In other words, it is a state of being half awake and half blurred, maintaining an ideal balance.
Alpha waves have been very popular in recent years. Many people use alpha waves to improve focus and restore brain vitality. In many large IT companies nowadays, such as Google, there is dedicated research on alpha waves and various brainwaves—beta waves, gamma waves—and their effects on the brain. They are also conducting experiments on the psychological concept of flow, to see how much it can improve employee capabilities. They even take certain drugs that enhance mental focus as an aid. This kind of brainwave research is not just theoretical in some high-tech companies now; it is also being tried in practice. Of course, it is all voluntary for employees—if you are willing to participate in the experiment, you can sign up.
This alpha wave technique is considered to have many medical potentials. Although it is not known exactly how this state is produced, each practitioner has his or her own explanation, and each person's feeling of alpha waves is also different. At the beginning of this session, Seth happens to give a brief evaluation of alpha waves.
Patty eagerly told Jane that Seth's material in Chapter 17 on "the various stages of consciousness" and "the different levels of consciousness" closely matched her research in recent years. Her comments and information also fit so well with the content of the current chapter. At this point Ruburt and Rob began to wonder whether Patty's appearance was not purely coincidental—because they had not communicated with her, and the timing of her appearance was very clever. Just when they were about to discuss "the different levels of consciousness" in this final section, she came to visit, and it was a visit without prior notice.
The notes say that Patty had read the recent chapters of Seth's book. Because Rob had been keeping records, but Jane did not read them—much of the Seth material was not read by Jane during transmission; once it was spoken, that was it. Jane herself also wrote poetry and novels, such as The Oversoul Seven trilogy, the first and the sequel11, and The Politics of the Psyche12, and so on. Jane herself was also a writer with a very strong creative ability. So she basically did not read the material after Seth had spoken it. At the very beginning she used to read it, but later she stopped. According to Rob, by the time this chapter was being dictated, Jane had probably only read the first four chapters. Although Jane had not read them, the two of them—Jane and Patty—had discussed the material from the recent chapters, because Patty was very interested in the several levels of consciousness of the mind, so Rob shared this material with her to read.
Seth's Comments on the Alpha State
Below, Seth begins to speak through Jane. He first jokes with Patty, saying, "I don't think your imitation of my voice is very accurate." Patty may have been imitating Jane's language and tone after Jane channeled Seth while chatting with Jane. Seth then says to her, my voice isn't that unpleasant, is it, joking with her.
Session 573
Then he gave his comments on the alpha state, which is crucial, because many people who study brain waves nowadays all start from alpha waves:
The "alpha state" is a threshold, a preliminary state between the physical orientation of the personality and the inner self.
The alpha state discussed here is a preliminary state between the physical state -- the physically oriented state -- and the inner self; it is the most elementary level.
Ruburt often pushes himself through this state and reaches deeper states.
Jane often pushes through this state; she has already passed through it and entered deeper levels. So generally speaking, Ruburt is not very familiar with this state -- because he passes right through it, basically never lingering in this state. According to Ruburt's characteristics, when he leaves the body, when his consciousness leaves the body, he does it the same way: he passes through the alpha state and goes directly to the next state, hardly pausing at the threshold of alpha, but rather taking off from there.
The Reality of the Senses and the Fluidity of Symbols
Seth went on to say that he would first give some introductory remarks about the content of the book, and then offer commentary. He said that, in physical terms, our several basic senses: sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch — Buddhism has a great deal to say about these, so I will not go into that — there are five senses, plus "consciousness," which people call the sixth sense added to the five senses. Taken together, they give you your main sensory data and make up your physical faculties.
But on other levels, the nonphysical levels, these are separate:
Because the sense of smell has a visual reality.
That is, smell itself, on its own dimension, on that level of reality, has its own visual image — every scent may present itself as an image. So just as you know, visual data can also be perceived through other senses.
You can find a great deal about this online. A while ago I saw a report about a little girl in America. When she was very young, to her, sounds were like one colorful picture after another; sounds were moving pictures13, not static ones, but dynamic ones. When she was little she did not know this was how she perceived things; she thought everyone was like this. It was not until she was a bit older and talked with other children that everyone realized this was not the case — when other people heard sounds, they were just sounds, and no colorful images appeared in their minds. She thought this might be a very strange thing. Later, after she graduated from high school, she applied to study painting, specifically to learn painting, with the goal of painting the images in her mind. She later created a series of pictures, all of them images that came to her while listening to different songs and different music.
Scientists cannot currently explain this phenomenon; they treat it as a kind of cross-sensory connection, calling it a "super-sensory" or "sensory association" phenomenon14, believing it is a link from hearing to vision, that the sensory system has made an error or gotten tangled up, that two unrelated things have been connected together. But through this Seth material you will understand: this little girl had actually opened up a perceptual system for other realities. In other words, on the level beyond our three-dimensional space, within the reality of sound itself, sound does have an image — it is just that you cannot see it. The same is true of everything else: the things we think are what they are all have their own independent realities in other senses.
Seth continued:
Symbols can come together and fly apart. One symbol can represent many feelings, not just one, but a collection of many feelings. The feelings within it can be perceived by you as a unity, or they can be perceived separately, one by one. Because everything has its own symbol for you, only for you, because it happens to you, and so you have a unique way of combining them. Symbols can be translated or perceived in many ways, like a string of musical notes, like a combination of several sensations, like a series of visions. In the various stages of consciousness, you will perceive symbols in different ways.
On different levels and at different stages of consciousness, we use different ways to feel this perception. For example, a fragrance is a perception. On the three-dimensional level, in physical consciousness, on the surface level of consciousness, what we perceive is a kind of smell. One level deeper, it may represent a beautiful image associated with the smell, a visual psychological impression — when you close your eyes and smell it. Deeper still, it will represent a deeper feeling: perhaps the scent of your girlfriend's perfume, the scent of her shampoo, or the scent of her body, and it brings out the feeling of your girlfriend. Although it is only a smell, the symbol it brings out may be your girlfriend. Many women love to smell the scent on a man — some people like the smell of tobacco on a man, or the smell of a certain cologne — at that point the smell is no longer just a smell; it represents many things behind it as symbols.
Thus, the whole multidimensional symbol also has its reality in those other states of consciousness.
The symbol itself is multidimensional; it is certainly not singular. It is diluted layer by layer upward from the deepest level of your consciousness — that condensed, intense, energy-rich multidimensional symbol — until it is perceived by you. On the first level of consciousness, it is one kind of image; on the second level of consciousness, it is another kind of image; on the third level of consciousness, it is another kind of symbol. The same is true on other levels of reality: in a certain space-time, in a certain parallel universe, on a certain level of consciousness, the symbol, the reality, the image, or a certain event that appears there also has its own existing reality in other realities. This one reality does not exist only in the world you perceive; it exists in other worlds as well, only the way it exists and the form it displays are different.
Thoughts Are Not Secret
Seth goes on to say:
You seem to think that your thoughts are secret, although by now you should know that this is not the case. Not only are your thoughts apparent through telepathic communication.
If you have telepathic means, then your thoughts are not secret; whatever you think, others can see at a glance, clearly. Seth says that after you die, those feelings become even more genuine. While alive, you have many disguises: for example, between husband and wife, you may not love your husband at all, yet every day you still say, "Honey, I love you so much," when in fact there is no love left in your heart. But in order to maintain this marital relationship, this habit of so many years, you say these words without meaning them. After you die, none of this can be hidden anymore, because your husband can see at a glance what is in your heart, and you can also see what is in other people's hearts. Under those circumstances, there is no need for pretense, and the true feelings come out: who you really like, who you really dislike, who you really have feelings for, all become clear after death, because you communicate entirely through telepathy, not through language.
And at times, without your knowing it, they also form what you may call "false images," beneath or above the range of matter that you ordinarily perceive.
You think your thoughts are secret, but in fact your thoughts, in different ranges, beneath, above, inside, and outside the material range, form what he calls "false images," or something symbolic. Your thoughts can be seen on different levels.
Therefore, it is as if your thoughts can be seen in the form of objects, appearing within other realities. They themselves are alive, because your thoughts are alive, not dead things, but grow in other systems, just as flowers or trees in the physical world seem to grow out of nothing. These "false phenomena," you could say, are then called "raw material" in certain other systems.
What does this mean? Many people go to have their fortune told, and when they meet a truly skilled fortune teller, someone of real ability, you sit down, say a few simple words, and he knows your past and future lives, and also knows what you are thinking right now. Many people say: I have not even asked him what I want to know, so how does he know what is in my mind? In other words, from a certain angle, that master fortune teller can see your thoughts at a glance, as clearly as seeing the clothes you are wearing.
So your thoughts, within other ranges of reality, appear like objects, except that they are alive, and they are always changing. In other reality spaces, they give rise, out of nothing, to many object-like things, so others can see them too. It is like in our own reality system, where flowers, trees, and grass somehow emerge from the earth. He says that these flowers and grass that emerge are actually a kind of false image. Why are they false images? Because they themselves are created by their own consciousness; consciousness is the essence relative to the flowers and grass, something from another time and space. But in your time and space, it creates real, solid flowers and grass. Although these flowers and grass are false images, they also become the raw material you use in other systems for imagining and conceiving: what flowers represent, what grass and trees represent as vitality, these are themselves symbols.
They are the "natural phenomena" already present in realities that you help sow but do not perceive, the raw material of creation.
You are the one who sows, but you dare not know that you are the one who sows. In that system, you think it is simply a natural phenomenon: why is it that a seed placed in the soil can take root and sprout, and grow into a towering tree, into flowers and grass? Why does it not work when placed on a rock? Why not when placed in metal or plastic? Why does it only work when placed in soil? You think it is just a natural phenomenon, very natural, that the earth grows these things. But he says, these things you think are natural phenomena are actually sown by someone: your thoughts are those seeds, your psyche is those seeds. You are sowing, but once you have sown, you no longer know it. So the phenomena, illusions, and material things you see one after another, you do not know are the results of your own sowing. In dreams or on other levels of consciousness, the symbols and things you see are all yours, but you do not know where they come from. As was said in the previous session, it is like a "bank of symbols"; they are all stored there, and you do not know it.
Thoughts Follow Laws
Seth says:
Your thoughts follow laws. Their actions and activities also follow laws. They must follow the same laws. You do not understand these laws.
Of course we do not understand what these laws of thought are like. We only have a preliminary understanding of consciousness, but we do not know what the rules within consciousness are. Although you say this thought is yours, you do not know how the laws of thought work.
Thus they are manipulated by other kinds of consciousness, like ever-changing natural phenomena that have nothing to do with you.
Your thoughts are being manipulated by a deeper consciousness behind them, but you think these are just your own thoughts, not knowing that there is an even deeper operating mechanism behind them manipulating them. It is like how you feel nature has nothing to do with you, but in fact nature is also the seed you planted, also something you created.
If you have seen the science program in that Four-Dimensional Space15 I talked about, you would know: human consciousness is already decided 10 to 8 seconds, or 15 seconds, before you become conscious of it. For example, when you choose which letter or which number to press, you think you made the choice yourself, but scientists testing with EEG equipment found that several seconds before your choice -- around 8 to 10 seconds -- your brain had already decided to choose that one16, only you did not know it yet. Only at the instant you confirm the choice do you think you chose it. That program gave many people a great shock, because you discover that you do not know who is manipulating your thoughts. Seth already pointed out this mechanism in this passage: the mechanism of your thoughts is not controlled by you the way you think it is; it is controlled by a deeper level of consciousness. The laws it follows are still not understood by us humans today.
Within such a system, the inherent consciousness does not know the origin of this phenomenon, nor does it know your own reality.
This "inherent consciousness" refers to one layer -- that very rigid consciousness of yours, our surface consciousness. It takes the evidence received by the surface consciousness's senses -- the physical senses -- as reality, just like most of us do. We only treat what the eyes see, the ears hear, the nose smells, the mouth tastes, and the body touches as reality. They would never think that these phenomena originate from outside their own system. Everyone does not believe that the things of this three-dimensional world seen by the eyes, tasted by the mouth, touched and felt, actually come from another time-space, another reality system, outside this three-dimensional world. Within this reality system it is just an illusion, just a symbol, but our cognition is not like that -- we think this is the real world, and what you are talking about is nonsense.
"Inverted Dreams" and the Unified Self
He calls this "turning things upside down." That is why the Buddha, at the end of the Diamond Sutra, says that all of you are living in "inverted dreams"17 -- these ordinary people, before you have awakened, before you have understood and realized, the world you perceive, your perceptions of it, he used a term called "inverted dreams." "Inverted" means everything is reversed: what you think is right is all wrong; what you think is wrong is actually right; what you think does not exist actually exists; what you think exists actually does not exist. At the time, he had no way to explain it to you one by one, so he could only tell you that you are inverted. You use your dreams, as if you were in a dream state, using things from the dream to understand what is real -- you mistake the real for a dream, and you mistake what is actually a dream for reality. The Buddha of that time probably could only think of explaining it to you this way, but people simply could not understand it.
Seth continues:
If I made such a statement to any reader, and cited it as an example, I would be accused of saying that physical reality is composed of the discarded material of the universe. However, I did not say that, nor was there any such implication in the case just mentioned.
When I explain this to readers, they will say: so you mean our reality is a camouflage of those thoughts and ideas, something discarded by another real universe -- the garbage of their thoughts, a byproduct, so this world is just waste material. If you think that way, then you have still misunderstood; you have only grasped a very superficial level. But this is quite normal, because many religions also stop at this viewpoint, believing that this three-dimensional universe is not worth lingering in, not worth learning from or experiencing, because it is inherently false.
Many of Buddhism's fundamental assumptions and ideas hold that this world is false, that everything is illusion, all of it the moon in the water, flowers in a mirror. Since you are amid the moon in the water and flowers in a mirror, why struggle with them? Are not the things you pursue just like the monkey trying to scoop the moon from the water? Then it is meaningless. Since you have understood this, you should wake up immediately and stop looking at that dazzling world of the moon in the water and flowers in the mirror -- it is all false, everything is illusory, like bubbles, like dew, like lightning, like foam, as Buddhism often says18. Like a bubble you blow, it has no meaning at all. So they believe you should not go struggling around in the middle of it; you should quickly abandon it and return to the source. That is why they tell you to sit in meditation, to contemplate, to find the inner self, and to perceive from the place of the inner self.
This is also a question many people ask me: what is the biggest difference between Seth and Buddhism? Seth also says you should seek inward, but Seth also says you should actively live your life, actively face it. This is fundamentally in conflict with Buddhism on this point. Buddhism wants to abandon this physical world, even never to return again, to escape from this cycle of reincarnation. This idea forms a fixed pattern and mode of thinking in many people's minds, making them believe that escaping reincarnation is a higher state, that leaving the soul leads to some other place, and that those who have left are at a higher level than those still in the cycle. There will always be a concept of "higher and lower" in human thought.
But they never understand that their soul, in this universe, is as he said in the previous two chapters: you are in the universe, and you are the center of the universe. This soul of yours explores in all directions, three hundred sixty degrees with no blind spots -- and by "three hundred sixty degrees with no blind spots" I do not mean the three hundred sixty degrees of the physical world, but exploration into all dimensional spaces, all spaces of possibility, all realities, and all existence. Your soul walks in the center of it all, and exploration of the three-dimensional world is only one part of it. Our many reincarnations are just this soul -- you can imagine it as a glowing sphere constantly discharging outward -- constantly sending out lightning in the universe, its radiance illuminating the entire cosmos. It explores everywhere, feels everywhere, and the feelings of the three-dimensional world are among those feelings. It is never said that the feelings of the three-dimensional world are lower, or inferior to the feelings of other realities; there is no distinction of higher or lower. It exists as a three-hundred-sixty-degree sphere, and every domain needs to be explored and felt.
And while you are exploring and feeling in this three-dimensional world, those other "yous" are simultaneously feeling in other reality spaces, only you do not know it. You only know the "you" of this present moment, and the "you" feeling in that other space also does not think you are feeling here. When you understand that you yourself are this soul, and that this soul simultaneously has millions and billions of fragments all feeling at once, then you will not think of which is higher and which is lower -- they are all you. The "you" feeling in the Pure Land is also you; the "you" who has attained Buddhahood is also you; the "you" who is now a beggar crawling on the ground for a mouthful of food is also you. This "you" has no distinction of high and low, noble and base. Once you understand this, you will know where your state is.
So here he repeatedly emphasizes: this three-dimensional world of yours, this physical world, is only the manifestation of your existence as a multidimensional being -- your "original self" is a multidimensional existence -- and this "you" in the three-dimensional world is only a display, an image, a form of expression of your soul in this three-dimensional world. It does not mean that the physical form of the three-dimensional world is lower than the nonphysical forms in those higher reality spaces, in probability systems, or in other systems. This concept does not exist. This is the most essential point you need to understand, and it is also the point that no religion has transcended -- they always think that nonphysical existence, the existence of the soul, is higher than physical existence.
They avoid one thing: they can never recognize the unified existence in the middle. They always say this world is unified, is monistic, but on this matter they commit the error of dualistic opposition. Since this world is "one," then is not this physical body also a part of that "one"? Why do you belittle it, despise it, treat it as a lower expression, and insist on entering that higher state?
Simultaneous Cultivation
Let me give you a vivid example, so everyone can understand more clearly. We will use human language to describe it: say, for instance, the physical reincarnation you are in right now, you consider it a lower form of reincarnation. Perhaps in some year, in some lifetime, you suddenly become enlightened, attain the wisdom of the Buddha, enter a state of "nirvana," reach supreme perfect enlightenment, and merge with the universe. You then enter a nonphysical time-space world, and continue exploring and cultivating there. On more levels, you might cultivate in that state, reach an even higher state, and finally one day finish cultivating through all the nonphysical worlds as well. Suppose in the infinite cosmic field, one day you truly attain the "Buddhahood" that the Buddha reached, then you become one with the universe, you are the universe, and the universe is you.
Then at this point you look back at your life in the human world—according to your human thinking, you feel that all those previous human lifetimes were just preparation for reaching nirvana: after reaching nirvana, you leap out of the three realms and are no longer within the five elements, entering a higher state to cultivate; in that higher state you cultivate further, and reach even higher fruitions—arhats, bodhisattvas, and finally Buddhahood. I am using Buddhism as an example; other religions have similar approaches. After reaching that fruition, all the previous stages were just preparation, layer upon layer, to ascend to a higher state. This is our human understanding. From the human perspective, is this understanding wrong? Not really; it is the human perspective.
But from the perspective of true cosmic reality and the truth of the world, this is mistaken. If time is one, if past and present exist simultaneously, then is not that "you" who attained Buddhahood also you? Is he not also alive in the present? Does he not exist in another time-space? Is he not cultivating right now? And you, in this present moment, in physical form, working as a civil servant, running a small business, or working as a small employee for someone else—in that domain, in the present, are you not also cultivating? That means you have two fragments: one fragment at the level of Buddhahood, and one fragment in physical form. Are not both fragments parts of this "you"? Then you are simultaneously cultivating Buddhahood and cultivating the physical body. So why would you reject this physical body? Why must you yearn for that state? You have not reached that state, have not entered that time-space, so why are you fantasizing about life in that time-space? What you do not understand is this: you are simultaneously both here and there; you exist in both at the same time. Since you exist in both simultaneously, how can you despise this one and prefer that one? It makes no sense; there is no logic to it.
When you cannot figure it out, imagine yourself as a glowing sphere. In the entire vast universe, you are the brightest sphere at the center, radiating light and lightning in all directions. This "all directions" is not just the four directions of the physical world, but of all dimensional spaces—three-dimensional, four-dimensional, five-dimensional, six-dimensional, seven-dimensional, eight-dimensional, ten-dimensional; every dimension has countless reality planes and countless spaces. The "you" in each reality and each space exists simultaneously. This light can illuminate all the dark corners, and one part of it is your three-dimensional world. It has no specialness, and no lack of specialness; it is the same as the others—the "you" in four-dimensional space, the "you" in five-dimensional space, or the "you" who has already returned to the source of the universe, all are you, just representing different regions on this sphere.
So I am saying a bit more here because I want to tell you: you must never think that our present physical world is merely something produced by thought, produced by belief, and therefore we should pursue that "belief" and "thought" itself, and pay no attention at all to the present physical world—not look at it, not care about it, not bother with it. Such a view is mistaken. Do not envy those higher states. You already have all those higher states; they are happening within you, only you do not know it and have not seen it. You say, "I want to become a Buddha"—you are already a Buddha, you are already Buddha. In that space where you have become a Buddha, you cannot currently perceive that space, and you say, "I still need to become a Buddha"—are you not making a joke of yourself? You already are that thing, and you still need to become that thing?
You can currently perceive your physical body, so feel it within this physical world; feel what you perceive this time. What is called cultivation, what is called elevation, is not what you imagine—a single subject constantly leveling up, constantly leaping upward. This subject does not change; the subject that is "you" does not change, but its levels of consciousness are different. Your current thought can only perceive your present physical body. As we discussed in Chapter 16, in the "system of probabilities," it is the same concept: the cells of the physical body that drinks water can only be perceived by the beliefs of the you who drinks water; the physical body that goes out to play ball—every cell is perceived by the beliefs of the you who plays ball. In other words, is there not a you who has become a Buddha, and are not the cells of that physical body perceived by the thoughts of the you who has become a Buddha? And you cannot perceive that right now; you perceive only what you have now, so perceive it.
One day your state rises, your consciousness reaches the state of the Buddha, and you are the Buddha. Would you not instantly feel that the atoms and molecules of your body are the body that matches the consciousness of the Buddha? Would you not instantly arrive in that time-space? So what is cultivation? Cultivation is this—not what you imagine, a single consciousness like a human imagination, an entity that constantly levels up and fights monsters, climbing rung by rung like a ladder, forever scaling new heights. It is not that. It is three hundred sixty degrees of simultaneous cultivation, simultaneous elevation, simultaneous diligent progress, and this simultaneous process is eternal. This very moment of yours is an existence in eternal time; it has no length.
In other words, whichever space you want to go to, whichever state you want to enter, as long as your thought reaches it, you can get there. If your thought cannot reach it, then wherever your thought reaches, that is where you are. So when the Buddha said "live in the present," that "present" does not refer to the present of the physical world, but to the present of your thought, the present of your consciousness—whatever level, whatever grade, whatever frequency your consciousness has reached, you feel the present of the you in that state. If your spirit body leaves the body, and your consciousness is in an out-of-body state, then enjoy the present feeling of being out of body, and experience that thing. If your consciousness enters a very, very deep level, close to a state of no consciousness, then within that, feel the present of that state. If your consciousness brings you into a state of Buddhahood, where everything is the state of the Buddha—omniscient, omnipotent, all-compassionate—then feel the present of the Buddha. That is what "living in the present" truly means.
Once you understand this, you can understand a fundamental meaning of cultivation: it is not about pursuing a present that you are not in, while throwing away the present you are in now. If you throw away your present, you cease to exist, and there is no meaning left. Your consciousness can only feel the present you—he might be a physical body, or a spirit body, or nothing at all, but that consciousness exists.
I am saying a bit more here to resolve a question many people ask—many people get stuck at this point. Let us make it clear today, and Seth happens to have reached this point as well.
Systems of Reality and Symbols
Seth says:
In your system, you directly participate in the formation of physical reality. Your natural phenomena are the materialization of the thoughts, feelings, and emotions of individuals and groups, collectively.
The world we perceive around us is a result jointly created by all of humanity, by part of humanity, or by us as individuals -- it is a shared process of materialization.
In this respect, your system is more creative than the one just mentioned. On the other hand, within other systems among these systems, there is a powerful and innovative collective consciousness developing.
That is, outside our physical system -- within other systems -- there is a powerful and innovative collective consciousness developing.
Within it, the individual's identity and sense of selfhood are maintained, but greater inner activity is permitted between individuals. There is a large-scale creative interchange of a "symbol pool," from which psychic and spiritual symbols can more conveniently be drawn. Because of this, these people more clearly recognize the connection between creative images and the data they perceive about nature. They deliberately alter and vary the data they perceive about nature, and experiment with it.
Let us translate this into language humans can understand: beyond this physical universe that we can perceive, there is another space-time, and within that space-time there is a larger-scale symbolic pool, just as in our three-dimensional world things are collectively constructed by everyone. Before our three-dimensional world was collectively constructed, on that nonphysical level, on the pure consciousness level, we were also constructing. On that level, each person also maintains their own identity -- Zhang San is still Zhang San, Li Si is still Li Si -- but the scope of Zhang San's and Li Si's inner psychological activity becomes much larger. In that spiritual world beyond the physical world, each person is jointly participating in a larger, core collective consciousness. Different people there jointly conduct experiments, making connections between that level of consciousness and the perceptual data of nature, then deliberately altering and varying these data of natural perception, and using these variations for experimentation. That is to say, before our physical world is manifested, they are constantly trying things on that level, constantly conducting experiments with various possibilities, and ultimately which one we choose is determined by the results of these experimental variations.
All of this involves an intimate way of using symbols. On some level of your personality, you know all the different ways of using symbols, not only in your system but in other systems as well.
These natural things in our three-dimensional world are themselves also a kind of symbol -- possibly a collective symbol, a symbol collectively created by everyone, and of course with your own personal creativity in it. We know not only how to use symbols in the three-dimensional world, but also how to use them outside the three-dimensional world -- out there, the symbols are used more intimately.
What does "not intimate" mean? The world around us right now is the three-dimensional world, and it is a symbol, but you are not intimate with it; there is a sense of estrangement between you and it: you think they are just what they are, you are you, and the world has nothing to do with you. You do not know that these things are the most surface-level symbolic manifestation of your inner feelings and emotions, so you think they have nothing to do with you, that they are simply objective existence. But in that nonphysical level of creation, when using symbols for experimentation, that feeling is intimate.
In reality we can see many people who have a very intimate feeling toward flowers and plants, toward small animals, toward the natural world. Standing on a grassland, standing in the woods, closing their eyes and taking a deep breath, they can feel their oneness with nature. Many practitioners, in states of meditation and sitting, can actually visualize and feel their oneness with nature -- this state is intimate. But in the ordinary daily life of normal human beings, there is no such intimacy; your application of symbols is not intimate. Usually when we have some warm feelings, intimate feelings, joyful feelings, once these symbolic things appear, we brush them aside and do not truly sink into them, do not intimately feel that present moment.
If you have seen the movie Peaceful Warrior19, you will know: in that instant while you are taking a shower, in some instant in the park, as long as you pay attention and observe, using your attention to observe, you will discover everything happening around you in that instant, and you will be able to perceive that intimate connection between symbols and yourself. Your personality on different levels -- the physical level, the nonphysical level, the conscious, subconscious, and unconscious states -- you know how to use these symbols.
As mentioned earlier, no system of reality is closed; the various spaces and times are open to each other. The different levels of consciousness can also be thought of as different spaces-times or different worlds, but these are internally connected, not closed off, and can be entered and exited at any time. When you enter these different space-time systems, there are inner connections among them that you do not know about. When you do not know about these inner connections, your thoughts, emotions, and feelings, without your being aware of it, change the natural phenomena in those space-times you do not know about -- within those, they are also a kind of natural phenomenon.
However, the innovative patterns developed in those systems can also be perceived to some extent within your own system.
The innovative patterns developed in the systems outside the physical world can be perceived to a greater or lesser extent within your system. There is often constant leakage between systems -- in the previous two chapters he also talked about this, that there is leakage even between these realities and even between probabilities.
Levels of Consciousness: The Elevator Analogy
In your various stages of consciousness, you pass through regions that can be connected to many systems. This is like riding an elevator: from the surface level—your conscious mind, this dazzling world you see—you keep going down. When you reach the first basement level, there is no light, total darkness, which is equivalent to shutting off your vision first. You have entered another range of time and space, and at this point you can also sense some things—whatever the mind's inner thoughts dwell on will all come out. Going down one more level, you enter a semi-trance state, a daydream state, and you will have some deeper symbolic things emerge. Those are not what you could see on the first basement level—although the eyes cannot see, what the mind sees is a concretization, virtualization, fantasization, and visualization of the things seen on the ground level. By the second basement level, these become a kind of abstraction; many things become abstract. At this point your consciousness has entered a deeper state, a trance state, or you could say that state where a person suddenly blanks out—as if drifting away from this time and space, yet the person is still here.
Going further down, you enter the third basement level—the dream state. The dreams of the third basement level are basic dreams, which have a certain connection to many things in the daytime and to the things on the second basement level, the first basement level, and the ground level; they are dreams with storylines. A house in a dream is still a house, a tree in a dream is still a tree, and their symbolism is the same—the terrifying animal you encounter in a dream has the same symbolism as the terrifying animal you encounter on the ground level.
Going further down, you reach the fourth basement level, entering an abstract state, and dreams become deeper dreams of a more underlying layer. These deep dreams come from the fifth basement level, but by the fifth basement level you are no longer conscious of them. The fifth basement level is an unconscious place, the most protected region of your sleep. On the fifth basement level, another great door actually opens—from the fifth basement level you can reach other reality spaces that you are entirely unfamiliar with, completely entering a world that has no connection at all to our present world. The fourth basement level still has a certain connection to the present world, but by the fifth basement level it is as if you have entered a true multidimensional, multi-temporal domain; it is a gateway, a transit hall—there you can go to any space you are able to go to, but those spaces are all imperceptible on your conscious level; they are all things on the unconscious level. Then the strange places you go to from the fifth level—you are entirely unfamiliar with them and unaware of them; you do these things in your unconscious, and then return to the fourth level, and only then do you create some dreams—those dreams have no logic at all, no connection, are utterly baffling, and you simply do not understand what they mean. These dreams are based on your experiences and adventures on the fifth level, as if you brought back some postcards—bringing back some fragmentary memories from time-spaces you are completely unaware of, and these things form a fourth-level dream on the fourth level.
Our emotions, feelings, beliefs, and thoughts do not only influence the surface level of this three-dimensional world; they have a profound influence on this entire chain. You do not think you have created anything over there, and of course you do not think you have created anything in the three-dimensional world either, but it tells you that in fact you have an influence on all of them.
The Unknown Ports of Symbolism
Seth said:
Some of the stages through which you pass are natural and inherent realms for other kinds of consciousness, and as you pass through these things, you will find that you already belong to that level's characteristic way of using symbols.
When you pass through that level, you will use symbols in the manner characteristic of that level. For example, when you reach the negative third level, a tree may represent a different meaning, not the meaning of the tree on the negative second level. By the negative fifth level, a tree may even be singing, and a piece of music may represent a tree. When you reach that level, you naturally know how to use the symbols of that level; it is only your surface consciousness that does not know, while the underlying consciousness knows all of it—because it is inherently a multidimensional thing. You only know the tip of the iceberg. When you see the iceberg above the sea, you think it is huge and magnificent, but in fact you have only seen one tenth of it; the 90 percent below is completely invisible, all beneath the seawater. Only when you put on a diving suit, strap on an oxygen tank, and dive deep can you see it—and the deeper you dive, the larger the iceberg proves to be.
Then Seth said to Patty that if you enter the alpha wave state, when you have a beautiful thought in your mind, you can see that thought grow out in your living room like a flower. During the break, Rob, Jane, and Patty were still experimenting with the alpha wave state—Patty had brought new knowledge and material and was sharing it with them, and the two of them were like little mice, extremely curious and eager to try it too. While trying it, Jane suddenly found that she had projected herself out.
Jane's psychic ability was extremely high, and the reason it was so high was that Seth had trained her when Jane did not know it—from a very young age, Seth had trained her in her unconscious state. That is why she was later able to channel, able to speak at such length and with such fluency as in the Seth books, which is extremely rare in human history. Look at the information transmitted by other channels: it is all very simple questions and answers or a few sentences, rarely delivered as a system, and rarely sustained continuously for 21 years. And the key is that everything she said over those 21 years was theoretically and logically highly self-consistent—if a person did not understand the truth and was made to speak for 21 years, there would certainly be contradictions between the earlier and later parts, but Seth would not have that.
When the three of them were all trying to enter the alpha wave state, Jane was the first to project out. A majestic sycamore pear tree, taller than a two-story building, originally growing outside the apartment, ended up coming into the living room. Then the tree moved away and became a parking lot. Jane seemed to use the alpha wave as a base for the purpose of projection, entering the past and entering that tree—she entered the inside of a tree that had already been moved away. She found that for a moment she was the tree, peering out from within its layers of leaves.
Your consciousness can project; this is something we will discuss later when we talk about the inner senses, and it is a basic human ability. You feel the myriad things around you—trees, flowers and plants, small animals—not only from your own perspective, but in the same instant you are that tree, you are that flower, you are that blade of grass, and what you feel is the feeling of that tree. The things of the inner senses cannot be described or understood in human terms.
The Aggressive Nature of Fear and Symbols
Then Seth continued:
Symbols in their form should be fluid and ever-changing. Some may be used as windows that limit original experience, thus becoming a method of deception rather than illumination or enlightenment. Whenever this happens, fear is always involved.
Symbols themselves should be fluid and changing, and this fluidity and change is what allows you to understand the essence of a symbol. But very often it becomes a window that limits your original experience -- you could have seen the full picture behind the symbol, but it only lets you see a part of it. When you look at the symbol through this small window, it becomes a deception rather than a method of illumination or enlightenment. Why does this happen? Because of fear. Fear is brought into the various stages of consciousness, acting as a lens that causes distortion, hiding the natural dimensions among all symbols, acting as a blockage and hindrance to free flow. Explosive symbols can be used to release primal energy, to let out those things that have been locked away. If there were no storms in nature, you would all go mad.
This passage is not easy to understand, and many people do not know what he is really trying to say. Let us analyze it bit by bit. Symbols in their concrete forms should be fluid and ever-changing. "Original experience" means that when a symbol contains many feelings, emotions, and experiences, you should use the most primal way to feel the inner meaning of the symbol itself, its inner significance, the emotions and experiences it contains. Every symbol has many emotions and experiences, and we should experience them authentically.
But very often this is not the case -- this fluidity and change will cause you to confine it into a window for observing it. When the symbol is changing, you do not see the full panorama of its overall change; it is like seeing takeoff and the airport through the small window of an airplane -- the symbols you see are only a part, a small piece, a fragment. Because symbols are constantly changing and flowing, when you try to observe them, you create a small window for yourself and limit your own angle of observation. Why does this happen? Because of fear.
This window then becomes deception rather than illumination -- this window should have let you see something greater, but instead it lets you see only a fragment, and you see an illusion. Why fear? Fear is brought into the various stages of consciousness, acting as a lens that causes distortion, hiding the dimensions among symbols -- symbols manifest differently on different levels of consciousness, and they also change on the same level of consciousness. The process of this change itself, the possibilities of this change, its richness and colorfulness -- that is what he means by depth and breadth. Symbols themselves are multi-layered and multi-dimensional, but you cannot see clearly that it is a symbol of a higher dimension, because once fear is brought in, you can only see things on one particular level. Fear also acts as a blockage and hindrance to free flow -- when you are afraid, the symbol no longer changes, or gets stuck somewhere, or you simply cannot see the other levels of the symbol.
I think everyone has had this feeling: if someone enters a state during meditation, out-of-body experience, or deep contemplation, at that moment most people -- I will not say all, but most people -- feel fear inside. When they enter another reality space, their hearts are extremely afraid. This fear makes you have no energy left to pay attention to the meaning of the symbol itself; you can only see its surface meaning. For example, during meditation you see a particularly frightening scene -- someone sees the image of a ghost, the image of a terrifying person. The moment they feel fear, they do not go on to observe the meaning contained behind this ghost or terrifying thing. The depth and breadth of that symbol become invisible; they only see the ghost on the surface of the symbol. This image of the ghost is like a window that limits the vertical depth and horizontal breadth of the symbol. Because of fear, we see one image or one feeling of the symbol and stop there, unable to explore its other meanings, believing that this is all the symbol means.
A symbol, in terms of emotion and feeling, has both depth and breadth. You cannot stay on that one level, neither going down nor going up. Whether horizontally or vertically, it has its range on the levels of consciousness. Fear keeps you pinned there, so many people in their spiritual practice or inner growth easily get stuck in a certain place -- they see certain things, feel certain things, and then believe that is the truth, and they go on to interpret it.
You may remember that in the previous session Seth said not to interpret -- because you simply do not know where its depth and breadth lie. Your current cognitive system has no way to explain it; you cannot explain it using three-dimensional logic and ways of thinking. Do not explain, do not interpret -- just follow it. Whatever your consciousness wants you to see, see it; wherever it wants to take you, follow it there. Do not use three-dimensional thinking to say: oh, this is so scary, there is a mountain of flames ahead, a huge cliff, too dangerous, not a soul in sight, so gloomy -- with that kind of thinking, you will never be able to progress further, and you will easily get stuck there.
So at this point what you need is explosive symbols to release primal energy. You need a point of eruption, a point of breakthrough, to truly break through the surface of that symbol and completely release the things that have been locked away. What are the things that have been locked away? They are the broader and deeper aspects of the symbol, the other things you have not seen -- in Seth's words, the fluidity and changeability of the symbol that you have not seen; what you have seen is only one facet of the symbol. At this point you need something explosive to blast out and release all those things you have not seen. Therefore, if there were no storms in nature, you would all go mad. We tend to say storms are a bad thing, a fearful thing, nobody wants storms -- but without storms there would be no subsequent natural development. Storms are precisely what provide the primal energy; storms are what bring change.
Seth continued:
Few people understand the aggressive nature of symbols, nor do they understand the relationship between aggression and creativity. These are by no means opposite characteristics.
We do not understand that symbols themselves carry a certain aggressive nature. Do not immediately think "aggression" is a bad thing when you see that word. If there were no aggressive occurrence or impact, symbols would lack their high degree of activity; they would exist in an environment of perpetual changelessness.
Let me give a simple example: suppose when you were a child you had a basic understanding of the world, and the things in this world carried a certain symbolic quality -- you thought candy was the most delicious thing in the world, and spicy food was absolutely untouchable, spicy was the worst, absolutely no one would eat that stuff. But as you grew older, in your teens you started eating malatang, hotpot, Sichuan cuisine, Hunan and Hubei cuisine -- all these spicy things -- and found them so satisfying. At that point you realized you no longer really craved candy; although you might still eat it occasionally, you did not really want it at all. The candy that symbolized supreme happiness to you as a child no longer felt like happiness or joy to you; you no longer believed that having a pile of candy was the happiest thing in the world. And the chili peppers that nearly killed you as a child -- when you grew up, you actively sought them out; the spicier the better, the spicier the more satisfying, and you even asked the chef to add extra spice.
Why is that? It is because the symbol is changing. As a child, candy was the symbol of joy, happiness, and satisfaction; as an adult, a Chongqing hotpot is the symbol of happiness and satisfaction. What would happen if this symbol did not change? Then you would be like a little baby, still eating candy when you grew up -- candy is good, spicy things you dare not try, and you do not want to try. So what he is saying in such a complicated and roundabout way, simply put, is this: you must dare to try. Symbols themselves carry different meanings; they have depth and breadth. Only then can you break through things you have never tried before, and only then can your experience be elevated and reach greater heights.
The Balance Between Creativity and Aggressiveness
Seth says:
The creative and aggressive aspects of consciousness enable it to use symbols and to pass through the various levels of experience. And the aggressiveness of thought pushes itself into a reality you do not understand, although this is still not known to you, and this meaning is not great.
It is through this aspect of using symbols that consciousness is able to experience the various levels. Experience itself has many levels, with its own depth and breadth. We humans often only feel the most superficial layer of an experience and then stop there, never digging deeper. Every experience has its depth and breadth, and we should make use of the aggressiveness and creativity of symbols -- by aggressiveness and creativity, I mean daring to try things you have never tried before, daring to do things you have never done before, daring to think thoughts you have never thought before. Without this aggressiveness and creativity, your life, your living, your experience will be as plain as water, without any ripples. You will keep experiencing the same things in a familiar, comfortable, cozy environment, and today's experience will be no essentially different from yesterday's. So when these symbolic things let you experience them, you must apply their creativity and aggressiveness, which can carry you into a world you previously did not know at all -- only when you take this step can you arrive at that next step.
Then Seth says:
Aggressiveness and passivity are both behind the "birth symbols," because both are needed, and both of them are also beneath the symbols of death, although this is not understood.
My understanding is that behind the birth symbols are aggressiveness and passivity. When you want to propagate your descendants, want a child, want something, deep behind it there are aggressiveness and passivity at work, and both are needed. Both of them are also beneath the symbols of death. But as for exactly how to understand it, I have not yet thought of a better way or a better example to understand it. We can set it aside for now, and if you have a better understanding, you can leave a comment below to tell me.
Seth continues:
When the proportions of aggressiveness and creativity are not appropriate, when the symbols flow either too fast or too slow for the particular psychological environment in which you dwell, then dullness occurs.
That is, when one aspect is too strong or the other too weak, the symbols flow either too fast or too slow for your psychological environment, and dullness occurs. Then many stagnations take place.
Put as simply as possible, there is an almost incredible moment, a void is produced. A symbol is caught between motion and no motion.
Symbols are supposed to be flowing and changing, but at a certain instant, a state of void is produced, and the symbol gets stuck between motion and stillness, a suspended moment, and you do not know where it should change next. Of course this is translated and reacted to in many ways.
In such periods, certain symbols have in fact lost their meaning, have escaped from personal experience, and leave only dull gaps.
When a state of "void" appears, the symbol no longer has much meaning -- when you see that the symbol itself does not represent any meaning, it has lost its original meaning. In other words, when a symbol no longer changes, it does not have much meaning. When the proportions of creativity and aggressiveness are not appropriate -- creativity too strong and aggressiveness insufficient, or the reverse -- this state will arise. This part is more a matter of psychology, of the subconscious level, and I cannot think of a better example to explain it to everyone.
Seth says:
These gaps exist quite really in many systems, and you meet them on many of your levels. You may find yourself experiencing a state of consciousness in which nothing seems to happen, no psychological scenery, or recognizable symbols occur.
That is, at a certain instant you seem to empty out, and the world seems as if nothing is happening, everything seems to come to a standstill -- no events occur, and there are no psychological feelings either, no sorrow and no joy, nothing at all.
These are not only psychological or psychic existences, but also, in terms of space, there exist blank regions.
This state of emptying out is not only psychic and psychological; in terms of time and space there also exist such blank regions. If your perception is keen enough, sometimes you can catch yourself encountering this state of reality -- entering a certain spatiotemporal state in which nothing appears, and apart from your own consciousness, there are no clear traces of any other consciousness. It is like being thrown into the universe alone, with no events occurring and no other consciousness present -- this is a state of "emptiness."
These blank points can be seeded with new symbols, and are often used as channels through which new creative concepts and inventions are inserted. These gaps are therefore recognized by others, and seen as dark spaces. They also represent resistance-free areas for those psychic travelers who explore inner reality, open pathways, themselves inactive, passively waiting. Some symbols also wait passively in this manner to be blown upon.
When you are doing psychic exploration, traveling through consciousness, the other regions are basically rather full, with all kinds of symbols, meanings, and things. But in these emptied-out regions, once you enter you find nothing at all, very vast and open, which amounts to a resistance-free area, and you can pass through it very quickly. It is an open pathway, like a broad avenue stretching out smooth and level. And while you are going through this process, the psychic exploration itself is also inactive, waiting -- this region is empty, and some symbols just remain still like this, unmoving. If you do not activate them, do not discover them, it is as if they do not exist.
In your terms, they represent future experience; in our terms, they are the future, the future experience, still latent at present.
These dull blank points are to a certain degree creative -- right now they contain nothing, but somewhere they are creative. Because other symbols can swim into them and be seen. Your thoughts and ideas produce symbols, and these are produced on different levels. If such a symbol happens to encounter one of these empty regions, it can produce new symbols within the region, and at that point you can discover that this symbol or this blank region has been activated. Right now it is only empty, not yet filled, but precisely because it has nothing in it, it can be filled in the future -- filled by the new symbols brought by your new thoughts, ideas, and experiences. So this kind of thing is, for you, like future experience, something you have not yet experienced, something that is preparing for your future.
Back to the Alpha State
Seth discusses this from the two sides of consciousness: its creativity and its aggressiveness. Your consciousness has creativity, and it also has a certain aggressiveness, and you use these two abilities to make use of symbols. For example, a flower is a symbol. A flower blooming in spring symbolizes new life, abundance, the birth of new life in the future. This is you using this symbol creatively. So how do you use it aggressively? It means you want to expand the flower, or tear it apart, crush it — you need to know that beneath the flower itself there are still deeper things. Use the aggressiveness of consciousness to penetrate the flower, see through it, transcend it.
Let me give another example with candy: when you give candy a greater meaning and dimension, and you creatively and aggressively feel that kind of satisfaction in the psyche, then you will expand the symbol of candy into hot pot — hot pot replaces candy and becomes your new symbol of a happy life. Before, one piece of candy made you happy; now one hot pot makes you happy. A kind of fluidity occurs in the symbol, so it is no longer fixed. If symbols were fixed, your life would remain unchanged, with no new experiences, no new feelings, and you would never discover that spicy things are actually so delicious.
Using chili pepper to replace candy, for you as a child, this was a kind of "either-or" contradiction — chili pepper was absolutely not a representative of a happy life; it was absolutely a representative of pain and fear. But there was always one time when you ate chili pepper for the first time, and the first time you ate it, you broke through. You broke through your cognition of this symbol, and it brought you into a whole new world. This process of breaking through is the process of breaking through fear. So the fear mentioned earlier is the core point that limits your experience of this symbol. When you remove the fear, when you use your creativity and aggressiveness to experience the symbol itself, it will bring you into a new world.
The aggressiveness and passivity Seth speaks of are two sides. What he wants to talk about is the meaning behind the two symbols of life and death, making use of the aggressiveness and passivity of consciousness. When the proportion of aggressiveness and creativity is not appropriate — when one side is too strong or too weak — you get stuck, the symbol becomes dull, and it gets stuck in an unchanging state. Using the example of eating candy and eating spicy food to extrapolate: when you do not creatively expand the symbol of "the good life," and only confine it to the single matter of candy, then this symbol gets stuck there.
But when one side is too strong or too weak, a state of "emptiness" will occur. When no symbol appears, at a certain moment of experience, it is as if you have gone through a moment of emptying out. In that moment, you have neither any other consciousness present, nor does any new symbol appear — symbols are the forms of expression of your feelings, and if no symbol appears, that means no feeling appears. At that blank point, in that blank place, there is nothing. That space of nothingness is exactly the part of your future that you have not yet experienced — to you it is blank, because the future has not yet been experienced, so it leaves room for future experiences and feelings. But from another angle, from a higher level, this space has actually already been experienced, because it happens simultaneously; it is just that you cannot feel it.
When the power of one side of your creativity and aggressiveness is too great or too strong, it will lead to not reaching a point of balance. So this last part of Chapter 18 is actually the most difficult part of this chapter to understand — it is not easy to understand the deeper meaning it is trying to convey, or to think of which examples in our daily lives it relates to; we still cannot think of them.
Using the Alpha State
Finally, let us look at Seth's last discussion of the alpha state:
The alpha level is undifferentiated; it is a transitional state. If you want to, you can get energy there, and you can use the energy there. It is a source or a pool, a storehouse of energy, held in reserve. It exists between the inner self and the outer self. From the deeper levels of the personality, symbols and omens both come into this region.
So it exists between the inner and outer aspects of the self -- as mentioned earlier, a state between the physical self and the inner self. Both symbols and omens enter this region: symbols are things of the outer world, and omens are things of the inner self. Because it occupies this position, it also has some special uses in manipulating the human body -- it is a state between the physical body and the inner self. You are learning how to use it.
Spontaneity is extremely important here. The consciousness you have before entering the alpha state largely determines the kind of experience you will have. It automatically focuses your attention on those areas. Going into those areas without any purpose in mind is also very beneficial, because there you may receive whatever necessary information you unintentionally wanted.
You cannot enter the alpha state passively; you must enter it consciously and with a certain purpose. The state of consciousness in the moment before you enter is the experience you will be able to have within the alpha state wave. If you have no purpose and just go in to wander around and feel the alpha state, that is also beneficial, because at that time you may unintentionally receive some necessary information -- you begin to make contact with your inner self, and a part of your inner self can be perceived by you.
As you learn to explore this territory, you can use it as a launching pad for other activities.
You can treat the alpha state as a launching pad for entering other spaces of reality. When you do this, you entrust your physical body to it very safely -- because it happens to be in a state between the physical body and the inner self, and the body has not completely lost consciousness. When your consciousness leaves the body to explore other realms, the alpha state can help you maintain a very good physical state. Of course it will do this regardless -- even without the alpha wave state. But the answers to past lives lie at a deeper level. If you want to know something about past lives, it is not at the alpha wave level; it is at a deeper level. If you want to, you can "go fishing" from the alpha state to see whether you can catch past-life information, but it is not in there.
Patty asked: Is it just casually like tossing a line into the water, or do you give it direction? Are there some steps? Seth said:
You can give direction to a certain extent, but you must seek direction from within the alpha state, and request it from those deeper levels.
That is to say, requesting while you are awake is useless; you must enter the alpha state and then give it direction and request it. Or with more training, you may perhaps be able to enter those regions yourself -- to directly see your past lives.
Patty asked again: Can I discover myself just by trying these different states? That is, to connect with my inner self in this way. Seth smiled and said:
You know you can, or you would not have asked me the question.
You actually know you can -- you have already made contact with your inner self. Patty said that was a very good answer, because she knew she had already done this.
After that, Seth gave Patty more than two pages of material. Patty may have asked some personal questions, about the inner self and so on. They said some things related to Patty, so those are not included in this session. This session and this chapter both end here.
Regarding the different levels of consciousness and symbols, and how consciousness uses symbols to expand your own reality, we will stop here for this chapter. Some of the parts we still do not understand, we will leave in an open space, and when we have a deeper understanding in the future, we will share it with everyone again. You can also write your own understanding in the comments below, and let us see your understanding and feelings about the passage just discussed.
注释与核实
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Source: Wikipedia "Inception" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inception) ↩
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Source: Wikipedia "The Little Match Girl" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Match_Girl) ↩
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This claim could not be verified. ↩
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Source: Stephen P. Thornton "Freud, Sigmund" (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy) (https://iep.utm.edu/freud/) ↩
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Source: Kumarajiva, trans. "Diamond Sutra" (CBETA Chinese Buddhist Canon T08n0235) (https://tripitaka.cbeta.org/T08n0235) ↩
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This claim could not be verified. ↩
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This claim could not be verified. ↩
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Source: George M. Stratton "Vision without inversion of the retinal image" (Psychological Review, 1897) (https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/Vision-without-inversion-of-the-retinal-image.-Stratton/b0e87f63ee2c7217c3f4b3a84ae8a6aaf6ca9b61) ↩
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Source: Encyclopaedia Britannica "Tao-te Ching" (https://www.britannica.com/topic/Tao-te-Ching) ↩
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According to Mike's original words, "for example, 'Oversoul One,' 'Oversoul Two,' all the way to 'Oversoul Seven,' the first and the sequel"; upon verification, it should be "Jane Roberts's 'Oversoul Seven' is not seven books numbered one through seven, but a trilogy—The Education of Oversoul Seven (1973), The Further Education of Oversoul Seven (1979), Oversoul Seven and the Museum of Time (1984); 'Seven' is the name of the protagonist soul, not a volume number." (Source: Wikipedia "The Oversoul Seven Trilogy," https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Oversoul_Seven_Trilogy) ↩
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Source: Jane Roberts "Psychic Politics: An Aspect Psychology Book" (1976) (https://openlibrary.org/books/OL4890737M/Psychic_politics) ↩
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Source: WBUR Here & Now "This Artist Paints The Colors She Hears In Music" (https://www.wbur.org/hereandnow/2019/06/05/painting-colors-music-chromesthesia) ↩
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According to Mike's original words, "a phenomenon of association between the senses, called 'extrasensory' or 'sensory association' phenomenon"; upon verification, it should be "the phenomenon in which stimulation of one sense automatically triggers an experience in another sense is scientifically called 'synesthesia' (also translated as tonggan or common sensation), not 'extrasensory'—'extrasensory' usually refers to extrasensory perception (ESP), which is another matter." (Source: Wikipedia "Synesthesia," https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/%E8%81%94%E8%A7%89) ↩
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This claim could not be verified. ↩
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According to Mike's original words, "scientists, through testing with an electroencephalograph, discovered that a few seconds before you make a choice—about 8 to 10 seconds or so—your brain has already decided to choose this"; upon verification, it should be "the experiment used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI), not an electroencephalograph: Soon et al. in 2008 found that activity patterns in the frontopolar cortex and precuneus could predict a person's button-press choice up to 7 to 10 seconds before the person became aware of the choice (the EEG (Libet) experiment measured a lead time of only about 0.5 seconds)." (Source: Soon, Brass, Heinze, Haynes "Unconscious determinants of free decisions in the human brain" (Nature Neuroscience, 2008), https://www.nature.com/articles/nn.2112) ↩
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According to Mike's original words, "at the end of the Diamond Sutra, the Buddha says that all of you are in 'inverted dreams'"; upon verification, it should be "'Inverted dreams' comes from the Heart Sutra's 'with no hindrance in the mind, because there is no hindrance, there is no fear; far from inverted dreams, ultimately nirvana,' not from the Diamond Sutra; the closing verse of the Diamond Sutra is 'All conditioned phenomena are like dreams, illusions, bubbles, shadows, like dew and also like lightning; thus should one contemplate them.'" (Source: Wikipedia "Heart Sutra," https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/%E8%88%AC%E8%8B%A5%E6%B3%A2%E7%BE%85%E8%9C%9C%E5%A4%9A%E5%BF%83%E7%B6%93) ↩
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Source: Wikipedia "Diamond Sutra" (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diamond_Sutra) ↩
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According to Mike's original words, "that movie 'Meeting Socrates at a Gas Station Late at Night'"; upon verification, it should be "the Chinese title of the film is 'Peaceful Warrior at the Gas Station Late at Night' (Taiwan translation), original title Peaceful Warrior, a 2006 American film directed by Victor Salva, adapted from Dan Millman's novel Way of the Peaceful Warrior, mainland Chinese title 'Peaceful Warrior.'" (Source: Wikipedia "Peaceful Warrior (film)," https://zh.wikipedia.org/zh-hans/%E6%B7%B1%E5%A4%9C%E5%8A%A0%E6%B2%B9%E7%AB%99%E9%81%87%E8%A6%8B%E8%98%87%E6%A0%BC%E6%8B%89%E5%BA%95_(%E9%9B%BB%E5%BD%B1)) ↩