Seth Speaks Appendix (beginning)

Appendix

Seth devoted three full sessions and portions of two others to this Appendix.  It includes additional information on several topics already mentioned in the book proper, such as coordination points, biblical times and records, objects as symbols, reincarnation, and expansion of consciousness.  Sessions 592 and 594 are particularly intriguing in that events occurring during the sessions highlighted and illustrated the dictated material.

We also added portion of six other sessions.  Five are class sessions; one is included because it is relevant to the discussion on after-life organization in Chapter Nine.  Another contains an excellent description of true spirituality.  In the remaining class excerpts, Seth answers questions that readers might also have in mind. 

These sessions show Seth as he relates to others in personal contact.  To an engineer he gives an explanation of the pulsations of atoms, discusses mental health with a nurse and aggression with a minister – all class members.  The sixth presentation is from a session held for a student in which Seth mentioned the Speakers for the first time.

Session 592

The Essenes had deep roots in some of the mystery religions of the Greeks.  Some of the Essenes set up schools that were not what they appeared to be.  Subterfuge was used.  There were various tests applied before an initiate could come close to the interior doctrines.  There were other groups of Essenes, therefore, beside the one generally spoken of.

The Essenes, as they are known, were a surviving group from a larger and more ancient brotherhood.  Some existed in Asia Minor.  Efforts were made to infiltrate into national or group cultures.  Certain basic ideas united the Essenes, therefore, though often they went by different names.  There were three basic groups:  the one generally thought of, an offshoot in Africa, and the Asia Minor group mentioned earlier.  Little contact existed between these groups, however, and gradually the inner doctrines themselves showed important variations.

The schools often pretended to be giving an education in other areas.  The stranger would be kept in this outer group.  Some attended such schools without ever knowing of the inner initiates, and the more important work being carried on beneath the camouflage.

Some of the members of the Zealots were originally Essenes.  The Essenes predated them.  John the Baptist was an Essene in all important ways; yet a man who steps forward in such a way automatically steps out of his group, and so did your friend, John.

There was some jealousy, then, from certain members of the Essenes at John’s progress.  At one time John attempted to join various divergent groups together as one brotherhood, but he failed.  The failure weighed heavily upon him.  Fire is seldom gentle, and John the Baptist was as filled with fire as Paul.

He was a far more gentle man, and yet in his own way as fanatical as any of the other main characters of that day.  He was much more against what he was against, than for what he was for.  Christ, you see, was to deliver the message and John was to prepare the way for it.

John had an alliance with a female cousin, as a youth.  He fled from the knowledge of this for the rest of his life, believing it sinful.

Now these were men filled out like sails with the energy of their roles, yet they had to have the personality characteristics of their time.  They had to appear as men before men, before Christ could proclaim himself as anything beyond the natural man.

The entanglements were those that were necessary in the context of that religious drama.  They were creative in that they bore within them the only seeds that could grow, in your terms, within that place and that time.

Records were often falsified; completely doctored, and false records were often planted.  Religion was politics.  It implied sway and power over the masses.  It was the business of the rulers to know in which direction the religious winds blew.  There were deliberate falsifications of fact, then and later.  Some sects kept false records on purpose as blinds, so that if these were stolen, the robbers would think they had what they were after.

In some cases the falsified records have been found – the misrepresentations – while the true records behind them have not as yet been discovered.

The Essenes kept sets of records to confuse the Zealots, and another set to confuse the Romans, and they very carefully guarded the inner set from which all the facts were made.  They were not as violent as the other groups, but they were as shrewd.

There were various marks made, however, to distinguish the various sets of records, true and false.  Now, I do not know whether or not we can get this through clearly … Give Ruburt a piece of paper, and together we will see.

(Jane draws various symbols on a piece of paper.)

Now, number one is an attempt to get at number two, which was simply a sign of a copy made, a distorted or doctored copy.  The middle one (three) was a mark made for a much less distorted copy, and the last mark (five) was for an undoctored record.

These are poor versions.  This looked more like a snake, a serpent (as Jane pointed to the fifth symbol).

It would be nearly impossible for anyone except one of the innermost circle to distinguish between some of the versions presented.  These signs would not appear isolated, but in such a fashion that only those who knew how to look for them would find them.  They were not blazed in gold on the title page.

There were other clues also, certain other sings to be taken in conjunction with these, that appeared within the texts.

Now, in some of these records, the dating, for example, would be just off enough so that only one well-versed would recognize a discrepancy.  Some would include an obvious error.  Those in the know would immediately recognize that the record was a fake.

Some of the distorted records have been taken as fact, and it is a good joke to realize that the Vatican holds some of these.  At the time, the church believed that these records could harm it.  In the case of these particular errors, the records instead could have helped the churchmen, but they did not have the sense to know the truth from the false.

…  In many cases records were faithfully reproduced, but with the names changed to protect the innocent.

Think of the language used presently by governments and diplomats.  Think of the difference between what your government knows, and what is told to the people.  Often when you hear a denial in such circumstances, you immediately leap to the correct conclusion – that in a month or so an affirmative answer will be given to the same question.

Words, therefore, are often used to cover up as well as to reveal.  Great efforts are taken so that knowledge is kept, often, from a majority and for a few.  In Biblical times this was all the more true.  Literary devices themselves served as formalized methods of seeming to indulge certain information, while actually offering instead falsified data.  No question in those days was answered directly – not by those who were at all literate.

To answer a question directly meant that you were simpleminded and lacked any appreciation of the questioner’s greater intelligence, for he seldom asked a question he really wanted answered.  It was a highly ritualized behavior; understood, however, in those terms.

In other words, you do not understand how to translate the material properly from many of these records, even when the translations per se are correct.

You would call whole pages of the Dead Sea Scrolls tremendous put-ons, since whole pages, in literal terms, are not true.  But these were expected exaggerations and embellishments that preceded the giving of information.

All professions, to one extent or another, had such fashions.  The records meant life or death if they were discovered as the wrong time.  Falsifications were often put in simply to lead any readers astray if the books fell in the wrong hands.

Again, those in the know had no worries.  They would not be misled.  To them the information was clear and the distortions obvious.  Now the Dead Sea Scrolls are full of such protective distortions.  The signs mentioned were but some of the clues used.  They appeared in many guises, sometimes intertwined with signatures.

These people were much given to codes; even the arrangement of the letters upon the pages, as you think of pages, had their meanings.  The weight or thickness of various strokes had meaning in terms of emphasis.  There were even certain ways of handling a preceding word, so that the word would be a clue that the next word was false.  Only those in the know would recognize this, of course, and the others would merrily digest the false information.

Descriptions of important individuals were changed to insure their safety, and backgrounds were often fictional for the same reason.  These were life and death struggles.  Some of the falsified records had poison on the manuscripts - deadly reading material indeed.

Many of the men involved did lead double lives then, known in their villages by one name, and in their brotherhoods by another.  In some cases, their more mundane identities were never divulged but to a few.  Later, when the Christians were being persecuted, there were many safeguards taken – particularly by those who believed they had a responsibility to live long enough to see the new creed find fertile ground.

Often Paul, or Saul, seemed to be where he was not, for example.  Word would be sent that he would travel to such and such a location, and stories planted there of his arrival, while instead he journeyed to an entirely different place.

ESP Class Session, Tuesday June 23, 1970

If you want organization then you shall have it – at any time.  You structure your own existence, and you choose those realities that have exactly as much organization as you need at any given time.

In this reality, you very nicely emphasize all the similarities which bind you together; you make a pattern of them, and you very nicely ignore all the dissimilarities.  Out of a vast field of perception, you choose to focus your attention upon certain specific areas and to ignore all others, and so there is perfect agreement among you as far as this small area is concerned.  The vastness that you do not perceive does not bother you at all, and you do not ask questions about it.  And yet it exists.

I have said this before: If you were able to focus your attention upon the dissimilarities, merely those that you can perceive but do not, then you would be amazed that mankind can form any idea of an organized reality.  (As Seth, Jane looked at the couch, where Mary and Art were sitting.)  I look now between the two of you.  When the others look at our friends here on the fancy blue couch, they see a picture of true organization.  There is an individual there (pointing), and an individual there, with space between.  The picture is equalized.  It appears perfect and organized.

However, the space between our two friends is not vacant.  You think of it as vacant because you do not perceive what is there.  The picture appears to be very organized.  As soon as you realize that the picture is not complete, however, then you must begin to ask new questions, and the old idea of the perfect organization is gone.

Now:  As you know, you do not perceive the atoms and molecules that swim about the room, nor those that fill the space between our two friends, nor the forces – the field forces – that exist.  The couch serves to unite them since they sit upon it.  And what do they sit upon?  Emptiness that you perceive as solidity.

Now without your particular physical senses you would not perceive the couch as solid.  Consciousness that has different perceptive mechanisms than your own is unaware of our now famous blue couch.  You make the organization.  Your thoughts perceive an organization.  You enforce the organization, and indeed create it.

(Question from a class member: “Do we all create the same organization and see the same couch?”

(To Mary and Art):  You each generally agree, I am sure, that you sit upon a couch.  You do not perceive the same couch.  You only perceive your own idea constructions.  You cannot see those of another.  Telepathically, you transpose your ideas in line with what you know of the other person’s thinking.  You agree that the couch is here.  Now it is true that within your physical system – for I know this will come next – you can measure your couch.  I expect at any moment that someone will get a ruler and measure it, and then say to me that the couch is so long:  How can I say it is not one couch?

However, within your physical system the instruments themselves are distorted, and of course they will agree with what they measure.  There is no reason why the should not.  Telepathically you all agree on the placement of objects and their dimensions.

Now, you use atoms and molecules in a strange way.  You transpose your ideas upon them.  You perceive them in a certain fashion.  I am not blaming you.  I have done it too, in my time, and there is good reason for it.  But the fact is that physical matter is not solid except when you believe that it is, and that organization is transposed from within upon the without.  It is not transposed from the without upon you.  You form the reality that you know, and even though the table holds up your arms and you may lean upon it and write, I still tell you that the table is not solid.

This makes little difference as long as you can write upon it.  It makes little difference as long as you can sit upon your blue couch.  But when you leave your physical system and when physical perception is no longer the rule, then you must learn new root assumptions.

Root assumptions are those laws upon which you agree in any system of reality.  You agree, for example, upon what objects are physical – it makes little difference whether they are or not, as long as you agree upon this.  Your consciousness belongs in a body.  You would not be caught DEAD with your consciousness outside of your body.  It is taboo!  Now the fact is that your consciousness is not imprisoned within your body; but as long as you believe it is, again, you will not be caught dead outside of it, there will be some amazement, indeed.

There are other root assumptions that you take as a basis of reality.  And in other levels of reality, there are other root assumptions.  These are the seeming laws by which you govern your experiences.  Our note takers are doing vey well, considering that the paper is not solid and neither are their pens.  It is amazing what you can do with nothing!

You are truly multidimensional personalities, as I have said before.  At some point in your development you will become more and more aware of the true nature of your identity.  There is, for example, a part of you who is very aware of the pulsations you have just been discussing, and who is aware of the pulse-like nature of memory.  When the pulse is in this physical reality, then you, as you know yourselves, have memory of this existence.  When the pulse is in another dimension, there is memory of that existence.  Now a portion of your entire identity has memory of both.  The entire personality structure dwells in many dimensions, and simultaneously.

You are at the very beginning of any idea of psychology.  You simply do not realize what you are now; and as I’ve said before, when you ask me questions about life after death, you automatically transpose – if you will forgive me – this lack of knowledge into the next realm.  Therefore, sometimes I am at a loss to answer your questions.  You are learning to know yourselves.  At the rate you are going, it will take you some time!

Now, when you properly understand how to use psychological time, then to some extent you can learn to alter the nature and focus of your consciousness.  You can turn it in many directions.  You can focus it in other ways, away from physical reality.  This does not mean that you will be left high and dry here.  It does mean that you will begin to explore the reality of yourselves, and of those other dimensions in which you have your existence.

There must be, however, a willingness to admit that there are other dimensions in which you exist.  You must also have faith in your physical self – faith that it will be here when you get back, and I assure you that it will.  There is no other way – and I repeat this – there is no other way of getting firsthand information about other realities except by the exploration and manipulation of your own consciousness.

Now when I speak to you I very seldom use such words as “love”.  I do not tell you that a God is waiting for you on the other side of a golden door.  I do not reassure you by telling you that when you are dead, God will be waiting for you in all his majestic mercy, and that that will be the end of your responsibility.  And so as I said last evening, in my latest chapter, I offer no hope for the lazy, for they will not find eternal rest.

However, through travelling within yourselves, you will discover the unity of your consciousness with other consciousness.  You will discover the multidimensional love and energy that gives consciousness to all things.  This will not lead you to want to rest upon the proverbial blessed bosom.  It will instead inspire you to take a better hand in the job of creation; and that feeling of divine presence you will find indeed, and feel indeed, for you will sense it behind the dance of the molecules, and in yourselves and in your neighbors.  What so many want is a God who walks down the street and says, “Happy Sunday, I am I, follow me.”  But God is hidden craftily in his creations, so that he is what they are and they are what he is; and in knowing them, you know him.

There are many words for psychological time.  I do not mean my method of meditation alone.  I do mean subjective activity on your part, and exploration.

Actually, you are with God now.  It is you who do not realize this.  You see, you have believed many tales, and symbolically they were very important.  As was mentioned earlier, they have their place in your lives and your development, but there are times when you must leave them behind, and you may feel lonesome for a while without them.

(Question: “Then we need these beliefs as part of our development, even though we cast them off later?”)

Yes, even though someone like myself will come along and take off the comfort blankets – for after a while they hamper your development, where earlier they helped you grow.  The fact remains, however: You do not have to die to find God.  All That Is, is now, and you are a part of All That Is now.  As I have told you often, you are a spirit now.  The avenues for development are open now.  You can, now, set out to explore environments that are not physical if you want to, but I do not see any rush of students at that invisible door!

Now I am going to close our session, but I would like you all to read carefully a copy of what I have said.  And now and then, when you have nothing else to do – nothing better to do – then try, try to sense that lapse in the pulsation of your consciousness.  Try to leap that gap!