Monday, April 26, 2010

Seth Heaven and Hell and the Soul Fantasy

My plan for this blog is to post material at least once a week from reader's comments or from my own insights or quotes from things I read. Recently, I decided to start reading The Early Sessions of Seth Material by Jane Roberts and Robert Butts. I'm currently in the first book (Sessions 1-42) and its really fascinating to see how they started out channeling Seth and to see Seth's initial descriptions of concepts developed more fully later in the Seth books. I found this quote to be an interesting description of how we, as humanity, have developed concepts of Soul, Heaven and Hell:

"In prehistoric times mankind evolved the ego and self-consciousness to help him deal with the camouflage patterns that he had created. This is no contradiction, and will be explained later. He did the job so well that even when he had things under control he was not satisfied. He developed at a loposided level. He used himself as a tool to dissect himself. The inside senses led him to a reality he could not manipulate as easily as he could a camouflage world, and he feared what he thought of as a loss of mastery.
The soul fantasy, or spirit fantasy, arose at about this time, and has been a disadvantaqge to him because it gives a name and designation to one part of the whole self, setting it up against the other part. It is this basic conception, however that also forced him to face one truth despite himself - that of continued existence, to which he gave the word immortality.
This conception is to blame for the superstitious attitudes, however, concerning the inner world as a whole, and some of man's misconceptions have been ludicrous and pathetic. I think now mainly of his giving the immaterial inner self a dwelling place formed of physical camouflage patterns. In other words, a physical heaven and hell. ... The trouble is, you have to clear away so many misconceptions to get at some of the truths behind them. The spirit is no less real because man has clothed it in such foolishness."

This gives a very interesting perspective on things like "The Fall", guild, original sin, and etc. It also shows how ubiquitous control is in the human psyche and how it serves only to deepen and amplify the illusion of our camouflage reality of physical existence.

The other thing I find interesting is that this description, at first read, seems to imply a causal framework in linear time for the evolution of part of our current (cultural) belief set. Lazaris (as does Seth elsewhere, A Course In Miracles, and other sources) points out that, outside of this illusion of physical reality (our current "camouflage" reality), there is no time as we know it and thus no causality in the sense of what we perceive as past events necessarily having a causal relationship with the present. The real causality is from inner to outer: from inner parts of our being to our outer camouflage sensory perception of a Now moment in a time and space context. This Inner to Outer real causality appears to us symbolically represented as a camouflage past which is consistent with our current set of beliefs (each Now moment arises with a consistent and believable past because we hold a belief in continuity in linear time). Hence "prehistoric times" from our current vantage point represents choices made deeper in our unconscious mind (much like the description of "The Fall" in A Course in Miracles" and Gary Renard's book "The Disappearance of the Universe").

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