Seth Lecture To A High School Class (March 25, 1967)

Seth Early Sessions, Vol 7, Session 329

Seth Lecture To A High School Class (March 25, 1967)

Now, dear friends, there is never any justification for war, and there is never any justification for killing.

It is true that basically there is no death, but this cannot be used as an excuse within your sense-system.  You have created death within your system.  Since you have created it you are left to deal with it.  As long as you believe that a bullet can kill a man, then it behooves you not to kill.

When you realize that a bullet cannot kill a man, then you will not need to kill.  All of you have lived before, and many of you will live in physical form again.  Some of you will be finished with earthly reincarnations after this life.  There is a boy in a third or fourth seat, back from the front in the left row, toward the wall.  He is on the last reincarnation within this system.

All of you have but one responsibility, and that responsibility is to the self.  Not necessarily to the self as you know it but to the whole self.  It is your responsibility, you see, to develop all your abilities.  It is your responsibility to materialize within your own system your own potentials.

I am no beady-eyed spirit.  I am no granddaddy longlegs of the spirit world.  I have simply lived before within your system and on your planet.  Unless you have read the material, it does me little good to go deeply into any specific problems or questions, since you will not have the background for this.  The only message I can give you clearly is that you must develop your own abilities.  You must probe into the intuitive self, for you will find much knowledge there.  Books will help you, but the greater knowledge is buried within the layers of the self.  You all have abilities, and you all have liabilities.  Both of these come from past experiences in other lives.  The inner portions of your personality know the details of your past lives.  The abilities that you have now have been developed in past lives.  Those problems which you cannot solve on a psychic and mental level, you will have to solve in the physical system.

You will have to work out these problems in sense data.  That is why the abilities within your system are still working within the systems of war.  There is no heaven and hell in Christian terms.  However, if a personality believes strongly in the reality of hell, for some time after death he will experience the hallucination of a hell which will be of his own creation.

This will last very briefly.  Heaven and hell, indeed, are mere representations.  They represented originally intuitive insights.  But no heaven or hell exist in those terms.  There is no place within the universe or within any universe or system for them.  You create reality according to your beliefs and expectations.  Therefore, it behooves you to examine your beliefs and expectations very clearly.

Your lives at this point are the results of your own inner expectations.  If you do not like your lives, then examine your expectations.  Your future lives will be the result of your own expectations again.  Change these expectations now if need be.

Every thought in one way or another is constructed by you in physical terms.  You cannot escape the result of one thought.  Every thought is an actuality.  It affects every action and it forms your physical environment.  As you sit listening to my voice, you are all subconsciously forming the physical environment of your classroom.  You are forming the physical chairs.  You are forming the blackboard.  You are all forming reality, as you know it.  Then with your physical senses, you are perceiving that which you have already so created.

If you do not like what you see, then who is to blame?  For these are your own constructions, formed in faithful replica to your own thoughts.  We do not have the time to explain now how this is done, but in the material we have explained it.  Certain telepathic connections exist which are what we term root assumptions, of which you are all telepathically aware.  Using these you form a physical environment that is cohesive enough so that you can all agree with what you see and feel and smell and touch.

It is all in one respect hallucinatory, and yet it is your reality and you must deal with it.  If you do not like the looks of the adult world, then you had better change your own expectations now.  The world in which your parents live is a world which they created.  It existed first in thought.  It existed first in mental realms.  It existed first as the stuff of dreams, and from this they spawned their universe, and from this they made their world.

It is the world in which you now will live, and if you will not face their problems, if you cannot solve their dilemma, it will be not their fault but your own.  For you also have a hand in this.  Every generation sits by.  The young generation sits by, apparently helpless while the parents rule the world.  But the young helpless ones mature, and they grow and they become parents.  They become adults, but what about their world?

What changes do they make?  How many of them, after criticizing their elders, look inward into their own hearts?  How many demand that they use their own potentials?  How many demand the best of themselves?  And it is this that you must do.  Anything less is disaster.  The exploration of inner space – this is your mission.  It will lead you into more exciting realms than any you can imagine.  It will literally reshape and remake your world.  If you see but one item within your universe and it disgusts you, then look within yourself, for you have helped create it.

You can change it in physical terms if you will.  But no real change will be effected, for it will spring up again in new form.  Any true progress is mental progress.  You must change ideas if you would change the world.  If you would end war, you must change yourself.  It is the idea of war, then that you must fight.

You will find exactly what you wish to find.  You will make of your lives exactly what you expect to make of your lives.  The beauties that exist in your physical universe are the results of constructive and positive thought.  The ugliness is a direct result of negative thought.

How many of you are ill?  How many of your parents are ill?  The illness is a physical materialization of an inner illness.  You can rid yourself of the physical symptom perhaps, by taking medicine, but the illness will break out again and again.  You can only rid yourself of such a condition by discovering the inner reason for it, by discovering the inner illness.  And there are various ways of doing this.

Many of these we have discussed in our sessions, and there is no time now to tell you.  Look where nothing seems to be, for no place is truly empty.  Where there appears to be nothing, there will be no distortion.  Within that seeming nothingness, reality can show itself if you know how to look.  That which appears full, that space which appears full, is misleading, for reality is already given to a rigid form.

Anything that you can see and feel and touch exists within your own reality, yes, and within it, it is legitimate and valid.  It is also highly distorted, for your physical senses are lovely liars that betray you constantly.  They form reality for you, and yet the reality that they form is highly distorted; and what you see, dear friends, does not exist and you do not see what does exist.

I regret the little time that I have to speak to you.  I regret also the necessary limitation put upon me by this method of communication.  Nevertheless I speak to you in terms of fondest affection.  The voice which we must necessarily use it unfortunately, devoid now of humor, and yet I am indeed a man of humor.  I give you all indeed my blessing, for I do have blessings to give.  Look around you at your surroundings.  Look within your surroundings.  Do not trust what you see.

You are all older than you know.  There is knowledge within you that you do not realize that you possess, and you can all use this knowledge.  You may think that you are 16 years old.  You may think that you have existed for a certain period of years.  You may think that before that time you knew nothing.  You may look back to a time and remember no identity, and you wonder:  Who was I then, and how did I come here?

And yet a portion of you knows the answer, and a portion of you knows who you are, and the memories of your previous lives are not in your genes or in your chromosomes, but in the psychic reality that forms the genes and the chromosomes.  For the identity is a different identity than the name that you bear.  The physical mechanism has chromosomes indeed, but the physical chromosomes have a psychic counterpart, and the psychic counterpart is the original; and within you is the codified information containing all your past lives and all your knowledge, and it is hidden so deep within you that the subconscious as you know it does not realize the truth, for the subconscious as you know it is, indeed, a very shallow affair containing only those hidden memories from this life.

But beyond this life, and before this life, and forming this life, there are identities and there are realities and these are not dead.  Identity as experience is intimate.  It is a psychic reality but it exists electromagnetically.  Identity, the self that you are, is made up of the selves that you were and, my dear friends, the selves that you shall be.  The selves that you were still exist.  The selves that you shall be already exist.  The lives that you have lived, in your terms, are still being lived.  There is no past, present or future.

Time, as you know it, is a distortion brought about by the operation of the physical senses.  Direct experience has no need of physical time.  You exist now, period.  The past, the present and the future as you know them are illusion, and yet they exist now.  You can influence the past today; you can have memory of the future.

You can draw upon the knowledge of the future today.  You can change the past tomorrow.  Your time is valid only within your system, and it is not particularly valid within your system.  The dreams that you dream are as real as the classroom in which you sit.  The dreams that you dream form your today.

You are, in some respects, more awake when you sleep than you are when you sit in your classroom and listen to my voice.  Your dreams appear as illusion to your normal waking self.  Shall I tell you how your normal waking experiences appear to your dreaming self?  Shall I tell you which of the two realities are more valid and which is least distorted?  Shall I tell you where your abilities do originate?

Do you think your abilities originate with the self that sits in the classroom?  What does your inner identity have to do with the self that brushes your teeth?  Yet surely you are wide awake when you brush your teeth, and when you dream surely you will say you are sleeping and your consciousness is dead.

How dead is sleeping consciousness, and where do you travel when you sleep?  How many miles do you cover in a day?  How many miles do you cover in a dream?  How many things do you learn in a dream?  You learn more things in a dream than you learn in this classroom.  You learn your identity in a dream state.  You have experiences even while you dream that are more real and more valid than any that you have while your eyes are wide open.

This does not mean that you must not manipulate within the physical universe.  I am not telling you that you should forget your responsibilities in physical life.  I am telling you that the origin and ability and power and identity has its origins deep within the personality, and that these origins have little to do with the waking self or which you are all so familiar.

The self that sits in class is not the self that wonders in a dream state, and the self that wonders in a dream state is, my dear friends, far more educated than the self that sits in the classroom.  The self you call yourself, what does it know?  To whom must it listen?  The self that you call yourself knows relatively little.  It is perhaps 16 years old.  Indeed, the inner identity knows, and the inner identity knows that it knows.  All of you are on a threshold.  Uncounted millions have been at that threshold.

If you sell yourselves, this is what you will do.  You will say, I am a physical organism and I live within the boundaries cast upon me by space and time.  I am at the mercy of my environment.  If you do not sell yourselves, you will say, I am an individual.  I form my physical environment.  I change and I make my world.  I am free of space and time.  I am part of the good mind.  I am more than I know that I am, and there is no place within me that creativity does not exist.  I will form the physical universe according to the picture that exists within my mind.  I cannot kill, for there is only life, and life cannot be killed.

Those of you who would change your world, then I tell you, listen: for if you would change your world you must listen to the voice within yourself.  You must examine your own dreams.  You must inspect the innermost portions of yourself, and from this indeed shall you be resurrected.

For the thought shall seed the world and the world shall seed the universe.  The cowering soul is, indeed, the soul who believes himself a physical being.  He is therefore at the mercy of every physical camouflage.  He does not realize that he is what he is.  He must live in the world he has created, and it is a miserable and cruel world.

The human personality is free.  Any limitations are those created by itself.  If you will not be limited, then do not create artificial limitations.  If you would see through space and time then do not give any validity to the distortions of space and time.  You can hardly follow your dreams while you consider your dreams hallucinations.  You can hardly grow into your full potential if you think you are a physical creature bounded and limited by the physical imitations of time and space, soon to fall corrupted into an early and filthy grave.  If you think that is what you are, then for all practical purposes, for now, that is what you shall be.  If you realize on the other hand that you are unlimited, that you are a part of All That Is, then indeed it shall be so as it is.

Shatter, then, these artificial boundaries that you have set upon yourselves, and that you have accepted from others.  If you are to grow older within your system, then mature within it.  Do not grow old into senility.  Grow into wisdom, for the wisdom is already within you.

The self that you shall be already exists.  If you will realize your potential then you will find it is already accomplished.