Session 674

Personal Reality, Session 674

Affirmation means acceptance of your own miraculous complexity.  It means saying “yes” to your own being.  It means acquiescing to your reality as a spirit in flesh.  Within the framework of our own complexity, you have the right to say “no” to certain situations, to express your desires, to communicate your feelings.

If you do so, then in the great flow and sweep of your eternal reality there will be an overall current of love and creativity that carries you.  Affirmation is the acceptance of yourself in your present as the person that you are.  Within that acceptance you may find qualities that you wish you did not have, or habits that annoy you.  You must not expect to be “perfect”.  As mentioned earlier, your ideas of perfection mean a state of fulfillment beyond which there is no future growth, and no such state exists.  (See the 626^th session in Chapter Five, for instance.)

“Love your neighbor as yourself”.  Turn this around and say, “Love yourself as you love your neighbor”, for often you will recognize the goodness in another and ignore it in yourself.  Some people believe there is a great merit and holy virtue in what you think of as humility.  Therefore to be proud of oneself seems a sin, and in that frame of reference true affirmation of the self is impossible.  Genuine self-pride is the loving recognition of your own integrity and value.  True humility is based upon this affectionate regard for yourself, plus the recognition that you live in a universe in which all other beings also possess this undeniable individuality and self-worth.

False humility tells you that you are nothing.  It often hides a distorted, puffed-up, denied, self-pride, because no man or woman can really accept a theory that denies personal self-worth.

Fake humility can cause you to tear down the value of others, because if you accept no worth in yourself you cannot see it in anyone else either.  True self-pride allows you to perceive the integrity of your fellow human beings and permits you to help them use their strengths.  Many people make a great show out of helping others, for example, encouraging them to lean upon them.  They believe this to be a quite holy, virtuous enterprise.  Instead they are keeping other people from recognizing and using their own strengths and abilities.

Regardless of what you have been told, there is no merit in self-sacrifice.  For one thing it is impossible.  The self grows and develops.  It cannot be annihilated.  Usually, self-sacrifice means throwing the “burden” of yourself upon someone else and making it their responsibility.

A mother who says to her child, “I gave up my life for you”, is speaking nonsense.  In basic terms such a mother believes, no matter what she says, that she did not have that much to give up, and the “giving up” gave her a life that she wanted.

A child who says, “I gave up my life for my parents and devoted myself to their care”, means, “I was afraid to live my own life, and afraid to let them live theirs.  And so in ‘giving up’ my life I gained the life I wanted.”

Love does not demand sacrifice.  Those who fear to affirm their own being also fear to let others live for themselves.  You do not help your children by keeping them chained to you, but you do not help your aged parents either by encouraging their sense of helplessness.  The ordinary sense of communication given you through your creaturehood, if spontaneously and honestly followed, would solve many of your problems.  Only repressed communication leads to violence.  The natural force of love is everywhere within you, and the normal methods of communication are always meant to bring you in greater contact with your fellow creatures.

Love yourselves and do yourselves just honor, and you will deal fairly with others.  When you say “no”, or deny, you always do so because in your mind and feelings, a present situation, or a proposed one, falls far short of some ideal.  The refusal is always in response to something that is considered, at least, to be a greater good.  If you do not have too-rigid ideas of perfection, then ordinary denial serves a quite practical purpose.  But never negate the present reality of yourself because you compare it to some idealized perfection.

Perfection is not being, for all being is in a state of becoming.  This does not mean that all being is in a state of becoming perfect, but in a state of becoming more itself.  All other emotions are based on love, and in one way or another they will relate to it, and all are methods of returning to it and expanding its capacities.

Now throughout this book I have purposely stayed away from the word “love”, because of various interpretations often placed upon it, and because of the errors frequently committed in its name.

You must first love yourself before you love another.

By accepting yourself and joyfully being what you are, you fulfill your own abilities, and your simple presence can make others happy.  You cannot hate yourself and love anyone else.  It is impossible.  You will instead project all the qualities you do not think you possess upon someone else, do them lip service, and hate the other individual for possessing them.  Though you profess to love the other, you will try to undermine the very foundations of his or her being.

When you love others, you grant them their innate freedom and do not cravenly insist that they always attend you.  There are no divisions to love.  There is no basic difference between the love of a child for a parent, a parent for a child, a wife for a husband, a brother for a sister.  There are only various expressions and characteristics of love, and all love affirms.  It can accept deviations from the ideal vision without condemning them.  It does not compare the practical state of the beloved’s being with the idealized perceived one that is potential.

In this vision, the potential is seen as present, and the distance between the practical and ideal forms no contradiction, since they coexist.

Sometimes you think that you hate mankind.  You may consider people insane, the individual creatures with whom you share the planet.  You may rail against what you think of as their stupid behavior, their bloodthirsty ways, and the inadequate and short sighted methods that they use to solve their problems.  All of this is based upon your idealized concept of what the race should be – your love for your fellow man, in other words.  But your love can get lost if you concentrate upon those variations that are less than idyllic.

When you think you hate the race most, you are actually caught in a dilemma of love.  You are comparing the race to your loving idealized conception of it.  In this case however you are losing sight of the actual people involved.

You are putting love on such a plane that you divorce yourself from your real feelings, and do not recognize the loving emotions that are the basis for your discontent.  Your affection has fallen short of itself in your experience because you have denied the impact of this emotion, for fear that the beloved – in this case the race as a whole – will not measure up to it.  Therefore you concentrate upon the digressions from the ideal.  If, instead, you allowed yourself to free the feeling of love that is actually behind your dissatisfaction, then it alone would allow you to see the loving characteristics in the race that now escape your observation to a large degree.

There is nothing more pompous than false humility.

Many people who consider themselves truth seekers and spiritual are filled with it.  They often use religious terms to express themselves.  They will say, “I am nothing, but the spirit of God moves through me, and if I do any good it is because of God’s spirit and not my own”, or, “I have no ability of my own.  Only the power of God has any ability.”

In those terms you are the power of God manifested.  You are not powerless.  To the contrary.  Through your being the power of God is strengthened, for you are a portion of what He is.  You are not simply an insignificant, innocuous clump of clay through which He decides to show Himself.

You are He manifesting as you.  You are as legitimate as He is.

If you are a part of God then He is also a part of you, and in denying your own worth you end up denying His as well.  I do not like to use the term “He”, meaning God, since All That Is is the origin of not only all sexes but of all realities, in some of which sex as you think of it does not exist.

Affirmation is in the spontaneous motion of the body as it dances.  Many churchgoers who consider themselves quite religious do not understand the nature of love or affirmation as much as some bar patrons, who celebrate the nature of their bodies and enjoy the spontaneous transcendence as they let themselves go with the motion of their beings.

True religion is not repressive, as life itself is not.  When Christ spoke he did so in the context of his times, using the symbolism and vocabulary that made sense to a particular people in a particular period of history, in your terms.

He began with their beliefs, and using their references tried to lead them into freer realms of understanding.

With every translation the Bible has changed its meaning, being interpreted in the language of the times.  Christ spoke in terms of good and bad spirits because these represented the people’s beliefs.  (See the 647^th session in Chapter Twelve for related material.)  In their terms he showed them that “bad” spirits could be vanquished; but these were, then, symbols accepted as realities by the people – sometimes for quite “normal” diseases and human conditions.

The very term, “Love your neighbor as yourself” (Matthew 19:19 and Mark 12:31), has been grossly misinterpreted.

Christ meant, “You form your own reality.  Those who think thoughts of peace will find themselves safe from war and dissension.  They will be untouched by it.  They will escape, and indeed inherit the earth.

Thoughts of peace, particularly in the middle of chaos, take great energy.  People who can ignore the physical evidence of wars and purposely think thoughts of peace will triumph – but in your terminology the word “meek” has come to mean spineless, inadequate, lacking energy.  In Christ’s time, the phrase about the meek inheriting the earth implied the energetic use of affirmation, of love and peace.

As I mentioned in Seth Speaks, the Christ entity was too great to be contained in any one man, or for that matter in any one time, so the man you think of as Christ was not crucified (See chapters Twenty-one and Twenty-two of Seth Speaks.)

Nor was the idea of self-sacrifice then involved.  The myth became more “real” than the physical event, which of course is the case in many so-called important historical events.  But even the myth was distorted.  God did not sacrifice his dearly beloved son by allowing that son to be physical.  The Christ entity desired to be born in space and time, to straddle creaturehood in order to serve as a leader, and to translate certain truths in physical terms.

Each of you survive death.  The man who was crucified knew this beyond all doubt, and he sacrificed nothing.

(“In Seth Speaks you said that Judas arranged for a substitute to be crucified in place of Christ himself –“)

The “substitute” was a personality seemingly deluded, but in his delusion he knew that each person is resurrected.  He took it upon himself to become the symbol of this knowledge.

The man called Christ was not crucified.  In the overall drama however it made little difference what was fact, in your terms, and what was not – for the greater reality transcends facts and creates them.  You have free will.  You could interpret the drama as you wished.  It was given to you.  Its great creative power still exists and you use it in your own way, even changing your own symbolism as your beliefs change.  But the main idea is the affirmation that the physical being, the self that you know, is not annihilated with death.  This comes through even in the distortions.  The whole concept of God the Father, as given by Christ, was indeed a “new testament”.  The male image of God was used because of the sex orientation of the times, but beyond this the Christ personality said, “… the kingdom of God is within (among) you” (Luke 17:21).

In a certain way the Christ personality was a manifestation of the evolution of consciousness, leading the race beyond the violent concepts of the times, and altering behavior that had prevailed to that time.

In terms of time – evolution as you think of it – emerging consciousness had come to the point where it delighted so in distinctions and differences, that even in small geographical areas multitudinous groups, cults and nationalities were assembled, each proudly asserting its own individuality and worth over the others.  In the beginning in those terms, man’s emerging consciousness needed the freedom to disperse itself, to become different, to originate bases for various characteristics, and assert individuations.  By Christ’s time, however, some principle of unity was necessary by which this diversification would also experience a sense of unity and feel its oneness.

Christ was the symbol of man’s emerging consciousness, holding within himself the knowledge of man’s potential.  His message was meant to be carried beyond the times, but this interpretation is often not made.

Christ uses parables that were applicable then.  He used priests as symbols of authority.  He turned water into wine, yet many who consider themselves quite holy ignore Christ at the wedding feast and think any alcoholic beverage degrading.

He “consorted” with prostitutes and the poor, and his disciples were hardly men that would be called city fathers.  Yet, many who consider themselves religious people hold on to respectability most of all.  Christ used the vernacular of the times and in his own way spoke out against dogmatic ideas, as well as temples that pretended to be repositories of holy knowledge but were instead concerned with money and prestige.  Yet many who consider themselves followers of Christ now turn against the outcasts that he himself considered brothers and sisters.

He affirmed the reality of the individual over any organization while still realizing that some system was necessary.  His whole message was that the exterior world is the manifestation of the interior one, that the “kingdom of God” is made flesh.

There are indeed lost gospels, written by men in other countries in that time, relating to Christ’s unknown life, to episodes not given in the Bible.  These formed quite a separate framework of knowledge that could be accepted by people who had different beliefs than the Jews at that time.  The messages were given in other terms, but again they reflected the affirmation of the self and its continued existence after physical death.  Love was always stressed.

One of the Gospels is counterfeit – that is, it was written after the others, and the events twisted to make it appear that some of them happened in a completely different context than they did.  Regardless, Christ’s message was one of affirmation.

It was not Mark’s or John’s.  There are particular reasons why I do not want to specify now.

At the time, Christ united man’s consciousness in ways that reached out into history.  The Christ consciousness was not isolated.  I am speaking in your terms now.  The same consciousness gave birth to all of your religions, therefore; the various frameworks through which the peoples of different times could express themselves and grow.  In all cases the religions began with the beliefs prevailing, spoke through the dictums of the times, and then expanded.  Now this represents the spiritual side of man’s evolution.  The idea-frameworks of psychic and mental life were far more important than the physical aspects as the species grew and changed.

Session 673

Personal Reality, Session 673

Left alone, hate does not last.

Often it is akin to love, for the hater is attracted to the object of his hatred by deep bonds.  It can also be a method of communication, but it is never a steady constant state, and will automatically change if not tampered with.

If you believe that hate is wrong and evil, and then find yourself hating someone, you may try to inhibit the emotion or turn it against yourself – raging against yourself rather than another.  On the other hand you may try to pretend the feeling out of existence, in which case you dam up that massive energy and cannot use it for other purposes.

In its natural state, hatred has a powerful rousing characteristic that initiates change and action.  Regardless of what you have been told, hatred does not initiate strong violence.  As covered earlier in this book, the outbreak of violence is often the result of a built-in sense of powerlessness.  (See sessions 662-3 in Chapter Seventeen.)

Many who unexpectedly commit great crimes, sudden murders, even bringing about mass death, have a history of docility and conventional attitudes, and were considered models, in fact, of deportment.  All natural aggressive elements were denied in their natures, and any evidence of momentary hatred was considered evil and wrong.  As a result such individuals find it difficult, finally, to express the most normal denial, or to go against their given code of conventionality and respect.  They cannot communicate as, say, even animals can, with their fellow men as far as the expression of a disagreement is concerned.

Psychologically, only a massive explosion can free them.  They feel so powerless that this adds to their difficulties – so they try to liberate themselves by showing great power in terms of violence.  Some such individuals, model sons, for example, who seldom even spoke back to their parents, were suddenly sent to war and given carte blanche to release all such feelings in combat; and I am referring particularly to the last two wars (the war in Korea, 1950-53, and the war in Vietnam, 1964-73), not the Second World War.

In these wars aggressions could be released and codes still followed.  The individuals were faced, however, with the horror of their violently released, pent-up hatreds and aggressions.  Seeing these bloody results, they became even more frightened, more awed by what they thought of as this terrible energy that sometimes seemed to drive them to kill.

On their return home the code of behavior changed back to one suited to civilian life, and they clamped down upon themselves as hard as they could.  Many would appear as superconventional.  The “luxury” of expressing emotion even in exaggerated form was suddenly denied them, and the sense of powerlessness grew by contrast.

This is not to be a chapter devoted to war.  However, there are a few points that I do want to make.  It is a sense of powerlessness that also causes nations to initiate wars.  This has little to do with their “actual” world situation or with the power that others might assign to them, but to an overall sense of powerlessness – even, sometimes regardless of world dominance.

In a way I am sorry that this is not the place to discuss the Second World War (1939-45), for it was also the result of a sense of powerlessness which then erupted into a mass blood bath on a grand scale.  The same course was followed privately in the cases of such individuals as just mentioned.

Without going into any detail, I simply want to point out that in the United States strong national efforts were made after World War II to divert the servicemen’s energies into other areas on their return home.  Many who entered that war feeling powerless were given advantages after it was over – incentives, education, benefits they did not have before it.  They were given the means to power in their own eyes.  They were also accepted home as heroes, and while many certainly were disillusioned, in the whole framework of the country’s mood the veterans were welcomed.

I am speaking generally now about the war under discussion, for there were certainly exceptions, yet most of the men involved in it learned something from their experiences.  They turned against the idea of violence, and each in his own way recognized the personal psychological ambiguities of their feelings during combat.

They were told by politicians that it was to be the last war, and the irony is that most of those in uniform believed it.  The lie did not become truth but it became more nearly so, for despite their failures the ex-servicement managed to bring up children who would not go to war willingly, who would question its premise.

In an odd way this made it even more difficult for those who did go into the next two, less extensive wars, for the country was not behind either one.  Any sense of powerlessness on the part of the individual fighting men was given expression as before, this time in a more local blood bath, but the code itself had become shaky.  This release was not as accepted as it had been before, even within the ranks.  By the last war (in Vietnam), the country was as much against it as for it, and the men’s feelings of powerlessness were reinforced after it was over.  This is the reason for the incidents of violence on the part of returning servicemen.

Hate, left alone then, does not erupt into violence.  Hatred brings a sense of power and initiates communication and action.  In your terms it is the build up of natural anger; in animals, say, it would lead to a face-to-face encounter, of battle stances in which each creature’s body language, motion, and ritual would serve to communicate a dangerous position.  One animal or the other would simply back down.  Growling or roaring might be involved.

Power would be effectively shown, but symbolically.  This type of animal encounter occurs infrequently, for the animals involved would have had to ignore or short-circuit many lesser preliminary anger or initiation encounters, each meant to make positions clear and to ward off violence.

Another small point here:  Christ’s dictum to turn the other cheek (Matthew 5:39, for instance) was a psychologically crafty method of warding off violence – not of accepting it.  Symbolically it represented an animal showing its belly to an adversary.  The remark was meant symbolically.  On certain levels, it was the gesture of defeat that brought triumph and survival.  It was not meant to be the cringing act of a martyr who said, “Hit me again”, but represented a biologically pertinent statement, a communication of body language.  It would cleverly remind the attacker of the “old” communicative postures of the sane animals.

Love is also a great inciter to action, and utilizes dynamos of energy.

Love and hate are both based upon self-identification in your experience.  You do not bother to love or hate persons you cannot identify with at all.  They leave you relatively untouched.  They do not elicite deep emotion.

Hatred always involves a painful sense of separation from love, which may be idealized.  A person you feel strongly against at any given time upsets you because he or she does not live up to your expectations.  The higher your expectations the greater any divergence from them seems.  If you hate a parent it is precisely because you expect such love.  A person from whom you expect nothing will never earn your bitterness.

In a strange manner, then, hatred is a means of returning to love; and left alone and expressed it is meant to communicate a separation that exists in relation to what is expected.

Love, therefore, can contain hate very nicely. Hatred can contain love and be driven by it, particularly by an idealized love.  You “hate” something that separates you from a loved object.  It is precisely because the object is loved that it is so disliked if expectations are not met.  You may love a parent, and if the parent does not seem to return the love and denies your expectations, then you may “hate” the same parent because of the love that leads you to expect more.  The hatred is meant to get you your love back.  It is supposed to lead to a communication from you, stating your feelings – clearing the air, so to speak, and bringing you closer to the love object.  Hatred is not the denial of love, then, but an attempt to regain it, and a painful recognition of circumstances that separate you from it.

If you understood the nature of love you would be able to accept feelings of hatred.  Affirmations can include the expression of such strong emotions.

Dogmas or systems of thought that tell you to rise above your emotions can be misleading – even, in your terms, somewhat dangerous.  Such theories are based upon the concept that there is something innately disruptive, base, or wrong in man’s emotional nature, while the soul is always depicted as being calm, “perfect”, passive and unfeeling.  Only the most lofty, blissful awareness is allowed.  Yet the soul is above all a fountain of energy, creativity, and action that shows its charactristics in life precisely through the ever-changing emotions.

Trusted, your feelings will lead you to psychological and spiritual states of mystic understanding, calm, and peacefulness.  Followed, your emotions will lead you to deep understandings, but you cannot have a physical self without emotions any more than you can have a day without weather.

In personal contact, you can be quite aware of an enduring love for another person, and still recognize moments of hatred when separations of a kind exist that you resent because of the love you know is involved.

In the same way, it is possible to love your fellow human beings on a grand scale, while at times hating them precisely because they so often seem to fall short of that love.  When you rage against humanity it is because you love it.  To deny the existence of hate then is to deny love.  It is not that these emotions are opposites.  It is that they are different aspects, and experienced differently.  To some extent you want to identify with those you feel deeply about.  You do not love someone simply because you associate portions of yourself with another.  You often do love another individual because such a person evokes within you glimpses of your own “idealized” self.

The loved one draws your best from you.  In his or her eyes you see what you can be.  In the other’s love you sense your potential.  This does not mean that in a beloved person you react only to your own idealized self, for you are also able to see in the other, the beloved’s potential idealized self.  This is a peculiar kind of vision shared by those involved – whether it be wife and husband, or parent and child.  This vision is quite able to perceive the difference between the practical and the ideal, so that in ascendant periods of love the discrepancies in, say, actual behavior are overlooked and considered relatively unimportant.

Love is of course always changing.  There is no one [permanent] state of deep mutual attraction in which two people are forever involved.  As an emotion love is mobile, and can change quite easily to anger or hatred, and back again.

Yet, in the fabric of experience, love can be predominant even while it is not static; and if so then there is always a vision toward the ideal, and some annoyance because of the differences that naturally occur between the actualized and the vision.  There are adults who quail when one of their children says, “I hate you”.  Often children quickly learn not to be so honest.  What the child is really saying is, “I love you so.  Why are you so mean to me?”  Or, “What stands between us and the love for you that I feel?”

The child’s antagonism is based upon a firm understanding of its love.  Parents, taught to believe that hatred is wrong, do not know how to handle such a situation.  Punishment simply adds to the child’s problem.  If a parent show fear, then the child is effectively taught to be afraid of this anger and hatred before which the powerful parent shrinks.  The young one is conditioned then to forget such instinctive understanding, and to ignore the connections between hatred and love.

Often you are taught not only to repress verbal expression of hate, but also told that hateful thoughts are as bad as hateful actions.

You become conditioned so that you feel guilty when you even contemplate hating another.  You try to hide such thoughts from yourself.  You may succeed so well that you literally do not know what you are feeling on a conscious level.  The emotions are there, but they are invisible to you because you are afraid to look.  To that extent you are divorced from your own reality and disconnected from your own feelings of love.  These denied emotional states may be projected outward upon others – an enemy in a war, a neighbor.  Even if you find yourself hating the symbolic enemy, you will also be aware of a deep attraction.

A bond of hate will unite you, but the bond was originally based upon love.  In this case however you aggravate and exaggerate all those differences from the ideal, and focus upon them predominantly.  In any given case all of this is consciously available to you.  It requires only an honest and determined attempt to become aware of your own feelings and beliefs.  Even your hateful fantasies, left alone, will return you to a reconciliation and release love.

A fantasy of beating a parent or a child, even to death, will if followed through lead to tears of love and understanding.

Session 672

Personal Reality, Session 672

Currently, mankind has little knowledge of the interior dream world, his place in it, or its effects upon his daily conscious life.

Many of the most powerful aspects of consciousness are at work precisely when it seems to you that you are relatively unconscious and asleep to physical reality.  It would be impossible for you to handle the vast amount of material available, in the context of time as you presently experience it.  To operate adequately in your highly specific field, an almost infinite amount of information must be instantly assimilated, probabilities calculated, and certain balances maintained of which you are not even aware.

Latently, your consciousness is capable of performing these feats, but the work cannot be done with the part of your consciousness that is strongly attached to the space-time relationship.  What you think of as your conscious mind is given the task of assessing the “facts” of daily living.  It then forms beliefs about reality, and these are used in the dream state as one of the main yardsticks, so to speak, that activate the emergence of certain probable events rather than others.

You use your beliefs like searchlights in the dream state, looking for other events that fit in with your ideas about reality.  Your convictions help you sift out probable actions appearing as dreams, of course – from others that do not concern you.

Since you are not only a physically focused creature, however, other issues also operate.  You have within yourself the condensed knowledge of your entire being.  This information cannot appear in any complete fashion within a consciousness connected with a physical brain.  The multidimensional reality simply cannot be expressed.  In the dreaming state, when consciousness relates opaquely to physical concerns, glimpses of the multidimensional self can appear in dream imagery and fantasies that will symbolically express your greater existence.

If your conscious beliefs are causing you great distress, countering beneficial beliefs may be received from this source.  Your being, the greater consciousness that is yourself, intersects with space and time; it is born in flesh simultaneously at many [moment] “points”.  (See the 668^th session in Chapter Nineteen.)  You would call each of these immersions into three-dimensional existence a life, with its own self.  And you are one of these.

Each self must experience itself in temporal terms.  But every self is also a part of its own greater being, a part of the energy from which it continually comes.  In dreams your energy pulsates back towards the being that you are.

In a manner of speaking, you travel back and forth each night through the atmospheres and entry points of which you are not aware.  In your sleep you do indeed travel, again, those vast distances between birth and death.  Your consciousness as you think of it transcends these leaps and holds its own sense of continuity.  All of this has to do with pulsations of energy and consciousness, and in one way what you think of as your life is the apparent “length” of a light ray seen from another perspective.

Beneath the dreams that you recall are experiences of consciousness that appear only now and then, and in distorted form.  These express in nonphysical terms your relationship with your own being.  Here you are regenerated, and you are quite free of any conscious beliefs.  From this level individual and mass ideals are formed.

The activity often goes on beneath ordinary dreaming.  To a far lesser extent it goes on all the time, for it represents the basis upon which your present consciousness rides.

The physical reality into which you are born is not nearly as solid or predetermined or definite as it appears to be.  Instead there is a field of rich interaction.  Your consciousness must be focused at one particular range of frequencies before it can even perceive matter, much less solidity.  In sleep your consciousness fluctuates between ranges of intensities, literally flowing into and out of physical-matter grouping, and forming from more plastic “pre-matter” stages, the final shape that matter will take in your world.  The same applies to events where some will be crystallized in physical terms and others will not.  The deep portions of your own being are aware of those purposes and intents that are uniquely yours.  Unconsciously, then you have within you what you might think of as a set of blueprints for the particular kind of physical reality you want to materialize.  You are the architect.

A system of checks and balances exists, however, so that in certain dreams you are made aware of these blueprints.  They may appear throughout your lifetime as recurring dreams of a certain nature – dreams of illumination; and even if you do not remember them you will awaken with your purposes strengthened or suddenly clear.

When you ae working with your beliefs, find out what you really think about the dream condition, for if you trust it it can become an even more important ally because of your conscious cooperation.

If you want to clear up an argument, tell yourself that you will do so in the dream state.  There you can speak freely to those who may avoid you otherwise.  Many reconciliations take place at that level.  Request the answer to any problem and it will be given, but you must trust yourself and learn to interpret your own dreams.  There is no other way to do this except by beginning yourself and working with your own dreams, for this will awaken your intuitive abilities and give you the knowledge that you need.

Your belief in the value of dreams can, therefore, increase their practical effectiveness.

(Those who are interested in material on the fluctuations of consciousness can refer to the following sessions in Seth Speaks: the 567^th session in Chapter Sixteen, on the phasing of atoms in and out of our system; the 576^th session in Chapter Nineteen, on alternate presents; and the ESP class session for June 23, 1970, in the Appendix, on organization in your present reality.  Seth states therein: “But the fact is that physical matter is not solid except when you believe that it is … “)

(In the 582^nd session in Chapter Twenty of Seth Speaks: “What you perceive of time is a portion of other events intruding into your own system, often interpreted as movement in space … “  That session, as well as the 581^st, also contains some applicable data on Seth’s electromagnetic energy (EE) units, their various speeds, and our interpretations of them as events, dream events, movement-through-time, and so forth.)

Chapter 21: Affirmation, Love, Acceptance, and Denial

Affirmation means saying “yes” to yourself and to the life you lead, and to accepting your own personhood.

The affirmation means that you declare your individuality.  Affirmation means that you embrace the life that is yours and flows through you.  Your affirmation of yourself is one of your greatest strengths.  You can at times quite properly deny certain portions of experience, while still confirming your own vitality.  You do not have to say “yes” to people, issues, or to events with which you are deeply disturbed.  Affirmations does not mean a bland wishy-washy acceptance of anything that comes your way, regardless of your feelings about it.  Biologically, affirmation means health.  You go along with your life, understanding that you form your experience, emphasizing your ability to do so.

Affirmation does not mean sitting back and saying “I can do nothing.  It is all Fate’s hands, therefore whatever happens, happens.”  Affirmation is based upon the realization that no other consciousness is the same as your own, that your abilities are uniquely yours and like no other’s.  It is the acceptance of your individuality in flesh.  Basically it is a spiritual appreciation of your singular integrity.

An atom can take care of itself, but atoms themselves are somewhat like domesticated animals; joining in the biological family of the body, to some extent they become like friendly cats or dogs under your domain.

Animals pick up the characteristics of their owners.  Cells are highly influenced by your behavior and beliefs.  If you affirm the rightness of your physical being, then you help the cells and organs in your body, and without knowing it treat them kindly.  If you do not trust your physical nature you radiate this feeling also, regardless of what health procedures you may take.  The cells and organs know that you do not trust them, even as animals do.   In a way you set up antibodies against yourself, simply because you do not confirm the rightness of your physical being as it exists in space and time.

You can affirm your uniqueness quite properly at times by saying “no”.

Individuality grants you the right to make decisions.  In your terms this means “yes” or “no”.  By implication, to always acquiesce may very well mean that you are denying your own personhood.

“I hate”.  A person who says “I hate” is at least stating that he has an “I” capable of hating.  The one who says “I have no right to hate”, is not facing his own individuality.

A man or woman who knows hate also understands the difference between that emotion and love.  The ambiguities, the contrasts, the similarities, the affirmation of the creature self, allows for the free flow of emotion.  Many disavow the experience of feelings they consider negative.  They do not permit themselves the dimensions of their creaturehood, and by pretending not to feel what they feel, they deny the integrity of their own experience.

The emotions follow beliefs.  They are natural ever-changing states of feeling, each leading into another in a free flow of energy and activity – colorful, rich, glowing tints that bring variety to the quality of consciousness.  Such states of personality can be compared to colors alone, bright and dark, the strong patterns of energy that always represent motion, life and variety.

To refuse them is futile.  They are one of the means by which physically attuned consciousness knows itself.  They are not destructive.  One emotion is not good and another evil.

Emotions simply are.  They are elements of the power of consciousness, filled with energy.  They merge into a powerful sea of being when left alone.  You cannot affirm one emotions and deny another without setting up barriers.  You try to hide what you think of as negative feelings in the closet of your mind, as in the past they closeted insane relatives.  All of this because you do not trust the aspects of your individuality in flesh.

Affirmation means accepting your soul as it appears in your creaturehood.  I said this earlier (in chapters Seven, Nine, etc.), but you cannot deny your creaturehood without denying your soul, and you cannot deny your soul without denying your creaturehood.

Session 671

Personal Reality, Session 671

Generally speaking, if you do not believe that you can become conscious in the dream state, then that feat will be relatively impossible.  It will go against your idea of reality, thereby preventing the opening and acceptance that is necessary.

While your beliefs do structure much of your dream activity, other issues are also involved simply because the focus of your awareness is not acutely directed toward physical reality, but is only opaquely concerned with it.

Once again, thoughts and ideas have their own electromagnetic validity also.  In waking life you test your ideas in the world of facts.  Facts are only accepted fiction, of course, but the ideas must make sense and fit into the accepted “story”.

In the dream state you allow yourself greater freedom, trying out certain ideas and beliefs in this more plastic framework.  You may therefore accept new beliefs initially in the dream state, and the intellectual or emotional realization may only come “later”.  In dreaming, the conscious mind itself is far more lenient and playful.  It can afford this greater permissiveness because it well knows that it need not immediately test out theory in the daily context.  It very willingly looks inward toward those areas of the inner self’s experience to see what it can find for its own use, quite like an explorer searching for resources in virgin territory.

The earth-tuned consciousness must deal within the space-time context, for only inside this framework can it clearly perceive events.  In the dream state consciousness ignores space-time relationships to a large degree, and yet it is still firmly based upon the body’s corporeal mechanisms.  Dreams then are physically experienced.  You perceive yourself running, talking, eating, in quite physical activities – except they are not performed by the body that lies on the bed.

The orientation is that of sense data lived most vividly, and yet, again, at an opaque angle.  In other words, in most dreams data is still being received and interpreted in the light of corporeal life.  These are the dreams most remembered also.

Beyond this there are experiences but seldom recalled, in which the usual identification of your consciousness with physical-life orientation is gone.  Images as you think of them are based upon your own neurological structure, and your interpretations of these.  When you consider survival after death, for instance, you imagine all the senses fully operating, though perhaps in a nonphysical body.  Perception without images seems impossible in that context.  Yet in some dream situations you enter a state of awareness quite divorced from that kind of sense data.  Images as such are not involved, though later they may be manufactured unconsciously for the sake of translation.  In those conditions you come close to an understanding of what your consciousness is when it is not physically oriented at all.

In your daily life you may suddenly know something without knowing how you know, without being aware of any particular image or sense impression.  The knowledge is simply “there”.  This kind of activity approaches the sort of knowing of your own consciousness when it is uninvolved with any kind of ordinary sense stimuli.  It simply knows.  In those certain dream states, then, you know in the same fashion.  You experience your being unallied with flesh.

That kind of dream awareness can literally regenerate your life, though the original impact will be forgotten, and the entire event will usually be translated into images before awakening.  Such dream events may be called experiences of basic being.  During them, the self or consciousness literally travels to the source of its own energy.  On another level atoms possess this same kind of knowing.

It may seem that such comprehensions have little to do with your daily life, particularly since they are so seldom recalled, and then only in translation; yet they provide you with additional energy – and when you need it most.

In periods of stress, the physically attuned consciousness will often momentarily forsake its usual orientation and let itself fall back, as it were, into the source of its own being, where it knows it will be regenerated and indeed reborn.

While you are physically connected you must interpret experience in sense terms, even that in dreams.  At times your consciousness can range into other areas, but then the events must be physically translated in some way.

In waking life you perceive only certain portions of events that fall within your space-time continuum.  In dreams you may have a greater glimpse.  You may for example see in the past, present and future, objects that in your time will take up any given space.  Often such a dream will be considered meaningless because at your “fact level”, past, present and future objects cannot appear at once in the same space.

The space is not the same, or identical, in any case.  It only appears to be so to you.

Space itself accelerates in ways that you do not understand.  You are not tuned into those frequencies.  Any point in space is also a point in what you think of as time, a doorway that you have not learned to open.

In somewhat the same manner, your physical brain is a doorway that triggers activity in your mind.  Your beliefs then are largely responsible for the areas of the brain that you activate, and for the resulting nonphysical action of the mind.

Physical focus provides you with a magnificent reality, intent and specialized.  Were it not for dream activity however you would be, relatively speaking, enclosed within it, afraid to try out new concepts and intuitive realizations in the face of what seems to be such rockbed reality.

The dream state provides you with a preliminary stage in which working hypotheses can be creatively formed and tried out in a context of playfulness.  Still, the dreams that you have and recall, and the resulting solution of many problems, represent only the surface layer of dream activity.  To follow yourself into your own dreams is a fascinating endeavor, and there in the dream context you can become aware of the working of your own consciousness.  To do so you must believe in the integrity of your own being.  If you do not trust your waking self you will not trust your dreaming self, and the landscape of your dreams will appear threatening.  Your belief that dreams are unpleasant can make them so, or at best you will only remember frightening dream events.

If you believe that you do not dream, however, you will inhibit memory of them – but you will still dream.  Those rich experiences will not form a part of your conscious life because of your belief.

Your dreams are private, as your waking life is, and yet there is a mass waking experience and a mass dreaming experience in which each individual finds his or her own place, and accepts or rejects events.  In your terms, the race at any given “time” simultaneously works out problems in the dream state, and those solutions are then physically materialized.  Because there is more freedom from time and space in the dream state, there is greater overall perspective; many solutions that may appear poor in the short range – as they are physically activated – will in the longer range be seen as highly creative.

Both privately and en masse, then, mankind utilizes the dream world as a preliminary working ground.  From these “fantasized” realities and probable dream events come all the physically accepted “facts” in your world of true and false.

(See Chapter Fourteen for some of Seth’s material on probabilities.)

Probable events, experienced dream-wise, and quite valid in other areas of reality, become, say, false in your world, while the same kind of event, physically actualized, becomes true.

Your wars are fought, lost or won in the dream world first of all, and your physical rendition of history follows the thin line of only one series of probabilities.  To you a given war was either lost or won by a particular side.  In your skimpy comprehension of events there can be only one definite outcome of a battle, for instance.  There will be certain hard facts; a fight with so many people involved, occurring on a particular day at a given place, culminating in a definite victory.  Historically there will be treaties signed, yet in far greater terms you are perceiving but one small dimension, or one corner, of a much larger happening that quite transcends your ideas of the times or places involved.

The initial battle, so to speak, took place on a dream level, then privately and en masse the race decided which portions of the event to actualize in physical terms.  Even in those recognized terms, however, it is quite apparent that the victor is often the loser.

The entire event transcends any true or false judgments.  An entire event, with all of its probabilities included, obviously cannot fit within your current frame of reference.

Again, in your dreams you work with probabilities and decide which ones will become your physical “true facts”.  Here you have great freedom both individually and as a race.  Here each man works out his own destiny, and with the use of this dream information quite consciously chooses which episodes he will physically materialize and experience.

You will accept from your dreams that information that largely agrees with your waking conscious beliefs.  There is interaction, as mentioned previously, in which new beliefs are tried out, so to speak.  In that regard, you are not at the mercy of your dreams in any meaning of the word.

You have not understaood the great give-and-take that exists between waking and dream experience.  You have been taught to believe in the existence of an artificial barrier between the two that does not in fact exist.  By suggesting before sleep that solutions to problems be given you, you automatically begin to utilize your dream knowledge to a greater extent, and to open the doors to your own greater creativity.

Session 670

Personal Reality, Session 670

Your moods and emotions have greater mobility in the dream state.  You may feel rooted like a tree at one moment and in the next experience yourself as a beautiful peacock, in which case you will perceive the tree change into the bird.

Disconnected from their usual daily attraction to physical events, your emotions will often form their own landscapes, utilizing dreams as their creative medium.  I have explained the great correlation that exists between your feelings and beliefs and physical conditions such as weather.  (See Chapter Eighteen.)  In somewhat the same way, you have a part to play individually in the creation of the dream landscape.  It is also the result of your feelings and beliefs on a different level, and while it is not perceivable in physical terms – laid out with its mountains and continents as your planet is, to be examined by your instruments – it exists in terms quite as valid.

This does not mean that dreams can be deciphered by the use of any given [general] symbols.  As you create and experience your daily life through your personal feelings and beliefs, so the same applies to dream reality.

There, however, your thoughts and feelings become “instantly” alive, springing up one upon another, coming full blown as it were.  The dream world exists in terms of energy also, of course, but simply at ranges that are not physically obvious.  Much  of your interior creative work and planning is done at this level.  There must be some differentiation between dream and waking experience just so that you can manipulate in the more narrowly focused daily life.

However, there is no great reason for the vast separation that now exists between your waking and sleeping lives.  As I mentioned earlier (in the 652^nd session in Chapter Thirteen, for instance), the division is largely the result of your mass and private beliefs in the nature of reality, and in the habits the race has acquired of separating “objective” data from subjective.

When you are determined to manipulate your environment, then you separate yourself from it.  Since you are part of it, this also leads you to try to place yourself apart from your own subjective reality.  It is quite possible to take your normally conscious “I” into the dream state, to your advantage.  When you do this you will see that the dreaming “I” and the waking “I” are one, but operating in entirely different environments.  Therefore, you become familiar with depths of experience and knowledge unknown to you before.  You acquire a true flexibility and expanded awareness of your own being, and open channels of communication between your waking and dreaming realities.  This means that you are far better able to utilize unconscious knowledge, and also to acquaint the unconscious with your present physical situation.

Such a procedure can bring you in contact with wisdom you have been denying yourself, help unify your entire life situation, and release energy for practical everyday purposes.  Even the decision to try such a venture is beneficial, since it automatically presupposes a flexibility of attitude on the part of the conscious self.

If you are afraid of your dreams, you are afraid of yourself.

As your present situation with all of its challenges, joys and problems is contained in condensed form within each of your days, so the same applies to your life.  Each night’s dreams then provide you with a rich bed of creativity.  Spread out before you in great profusion, you will find not only any problems but their solutions.

Now, in physical terms it may take some time before your conscious mind accepts or recognizes a diagnosis given in a dream.  It may come to you later in altered form as a hunch or sudden intuition, or an urge for action.  If you do not trust yourself you may ignore such impetuses and not take advantage of the answers.

The enlightened conscious mind is always alert for such messages.  You can also go steps beyond this into the dream condition itself, requesting certain dreams, certain solutions, and therefore shortening the time, so to speak, that may be involved otherwise.

Session 669

Personal Reality, Session 669

Because the point of power and action is in your present as you understand it, so each day is like the kind of window that can provide many views through its different panes.

The window of each day can be opened or closed, but it is framed by your current psychological experience.  Even when it is shut light shines through it, illuminating your daily life.  In miniature form each day contains, in its own way, clues to all of your own simultaneous existences.  The present self does not exist in isolation.

Within any given twenty-four hour period, then, traces and aspects of all of your other experiences appear in their own way.  You each contain aspects of your other identities within your current selves – some very obvious perhaps and others barely noticeable.  Abilities focused upon in one life may be recognized as your own now, for example, but not strongly utilized.

Vague yearnings toward certain accomplishments may be clues that the necessary characteristics are inherent but untrained in the self that you know.  In its own way, the twenty-four hour period represents both an entire lifetime and many lives in one.  In it, symbolically, you have “death” as your physically attuned consciousness comes to the end of the amount of stimuli it can comfortably handle without rest.  So, at your normal physical death, you come to the point where your earth-attuned consciousness can no longer handle further data without a “longer rest”, and organize it into a creative meaningful whole – in terms of time.

Each day therefore is an incarnation , so to speak, but not only symbolically – for through soul’s intersection with the flesh, each self mirrors daily its “reincarnational” or simultaneous selves.

The same applies on what you may think of as a more practical level, in that each day also holds within it the answers to current problems.  If you are aware of a particular problem (challenge), therefore, you can be assured that its solution is as much there and with you as the problem is.  The solution is simply the problem’s other side, upon which you may not be focusing.  There will even be clear clues as to the proper direction for you to take – these will already be within your experience, but unrecognized because you are concentrating so upon the problem.

This applies to any kind of dilemma.

Although you are an individual and with free will, you are also part of another you.  You simply do not identify with your greater self now.  You have your own unique characteristics.  Your greater being also possesses its own originality, yet there will be what you may think of as a family resemblance, and so overall you and your other self often choose the same kinds of challenges, if in dissimilar ways.

In their own ways, other portions of your multidimensional being are involved in experiences, then, somewhat similar to your own, though on the outside the situation may be completely different.  Their progress lies latent within the window of the moment point – the moment point simply being your current intersection with the reality that you know.

The adventures of your simultaneous selves, again, appear as traces in your own consciousness, as ideas or daydreams or disconnected images, or sometimes even in sudden intuitions.  They can be drawn upon, drawn out, to help you understand current problems.

This does not mean that you will necessarily have a flood of reincarnational information, instant intuitive recognition of “past” lives, or experience any such intrusive data.  It does mean that in your own life such information automatically appears in intimate ways, but couched within the framework of your own comprehensions, even passing unobtrusively through your conscious thoughts.

Many artists unknowingly paint portraits of their simultaneous selves.  Many mothers find themselves feeling younger than their offspring at times, or about to call some of their children by different names.  Impulses to try activities you have not tried before may indeed be messages from other portions of your own being.

There simply is no time as you think of it, only a present in which all things occur.  There are miracles of condensed information within the cells themselves that scientists cannot perceive, for they exist outside of the scope of physical instruments.  In its own way, cellular comprehension includes a vast recognition of probabilities in your terms, and works with flashing manipulations in which these probabilities are contended with and responded to – and therefore altered.

The physically attuned conscious mind in your now cannot handle those staggering probabilities while maintaining a sense of identity, yet there are conscious traces within your daily thoughts that are the psychological representations of such knowledge.

Often you do not trust your imagination, considering that it deals with phenomena that cannot be called fact.  Therefore you artificially form a situation in which overall choices must be made.  If you are too imaginative, for example, you may not be able to adequately deal with physical life.  This applies only in the cultural media in which you presently operate, however.  Originally, and in your terms of time, it was precisely the imagination that in its own way set you apart from other creatures, enabling you to form realities in your mind that you could “later” exteriorize.

Because you now distrust the imagination so, you do not understand the great clues it gives you, both in terms of problem solving and of creative expression.  Many quite valid reincarnational memories come as imaginings, but you do not trust them.  A good percentage of your problems can be worked out rather easily through the use of your imagination.

Often you inadvertently use it to prolong “negative” circumstances, as you think of all the things that you could do wrong.  Yet you can employ it very constructively, altering past, present and future.  To do so in your present, freely imagine a situation in which you are happy.  To begin with your imaginings may seem foolish.  If you are elderly, poor and lonely, it may seem highly ludicrous to think of yourself as twenty, wealthy, and surrounded by friends and admirers.

Indeed, if after such an enjoyable exercise you look about you and compare what you have envisioned with what you have, then you may feel worse than you did before.  You are to realize that this imaginative world does exist – but not in the world of facts that you know.  To some extent, however, according to your freedom within it, such an exercise will automatically rejuvenate your body, mind and spirit, and begin to draw to you whatever equivalent is possible for you within the world of facts that you know.

Using age as an example now, it may seem to you that you are a given age, that within your subjective experience it must be paramount, that regardless of your age you are to some extent closed off from the experience of being any other age.  In some simultaneous existences you are very young, however, and in others very old.  Some of your physical cells are brand new, so to speak – the regeneration of fresh life is physically within you; in your terms this is true not only until your death but even after it, when your hair and nails can still grow.  Identify then with the constantly new energy alive within you in the now of your being and realize that on all levels you are biologically and psychologically connected with that greater identity that is your own.

No matter what your current situation, the answers lie within your own aspirations and abilities.  Often you will hold down or inhibit certain aspects of your experience in order to use others – using those available will automatically free you from inhibitions in other areas.

There may be physical circumstances involving birth defects that are beyond alteration, where experience must be focused along other than usual pathways, yet even here those talents and characteristics that are available will open up vistas of experience and achievement.

When you are utilizing your imagination in the way I have suggested, purposefully do so in a playful manner, knowing that in so-called realistic terms there may be great discrepancies between imagination and fact.  In your reality take that for granted.  Yet often your freewheeling, “silly”, seemingly unrealistic imagination will bring you quite practical solutions to your problems, for if the exercise is done properly you will be automatically releasing yourself from restrictions that you have taken for granted.

Even if a direct solution does not appear, rejuvenation will of itself begin to point you in the proper direction.  If you are a woman in an unhappy marriage, for example, you may begin by imagining yourself with a fine suitor.  Now:  No Sir Galahad may appear, but if the exercise is pursued properly you will automatically begin to feel loved, and therefore worthy of love, and lovable, where before you felt rejected, unworthy and inferior.  This feeling of being loved will alter your reality, drawing love to you.  You will act loved.  Your spouse may then find you exhibiting characteristics of a most pleasant nature, and he himself may change.

On the other hand you may draw another man to you, and end the marriage that has served its purposes in all ways, finding now the impetus and the reasons for change.  Because your imagination transcends time, it is one of your greatest touchstones to your own identity.

You must, of course, be able to distinguish between the world of imagination and the physical world of fact in order to be able to manipulate effectively.  But physical reality springs from the imagination, which follows the path of your beliefs.

In the exercise just given, you use the belief in effective change in any given area, and then allow your imagination freedom along those directed lines.  Such an exercise automatically does even more, opening up the window of perception and letting in the knowledge and experience of other portions of the self.  As this light and energy flows through, it will be tinted or colored by your own psychological reality, as the rays of the sun are through colored glass.  This simply means that the other-dimensional information will often appear in ordinary guise, through an intuitive hunch, a sudden idea, or some solution that has already occurred to you but has not been acted upon.

Your cells’ multidimensional knowledge is usually not consciously available, nor can they put it into psychological terms for you.  Such work with the imagination acts as a trigger, however, drawing information to you from other levels of your greater reality, and concentrating it on the specific problem at hand.  It will then appear in terms understandable to your own experience.

In itself, such an exercise creatively alters probabilities, for you no longer live with the problem as an unchanging concrete reality.  This is a psychological and psychic impetus, altering the messages that you habitually send to your body and to its cellular construction.  You are then creatively manipulating in several layers of experience.

Take for example the instances just given: The older person imagining youth will, during such an exercise, reactivate certain hormonal and chemical changes becoming younger; and the woman who feels rejected does the same thing when imagining herself loved.

Such practice also activates within the self all of its unconscious but quite valid experiences, drawing out similar episodes on the part of other simultaneous lives.  In one existence the old person is young.  The unloved woman is indeed beloved.  These unconscious realities become turned on through the use of the imagination.  each day is a window into each life.

Chapter 20: The Dream Landscape, The Physical World, Probabilities, And Your Daily Experience

Because you are physical creatures even your dreams must be translated through the reality of your flesh.  En masse and through the methods I have described, you help form a physical reality in which, however, each experience is unique.

In the same way each of you form an overall dream world in which there is some general agreement, but in which each experience is original.  The dream world has its reaches as the physical one does.  In waking reality, beliefs take time before their materialization is apparent.  From infinite probable acts, only one can be physically experienced as a rule.

The dream world operates as a creative situation in which probable acts are instantly materialized, laid out in actual or symbolic form.  From these you then choose the most appropriate for physical expression.  There are other important reasons for dreaming, but here we will confine ourselves to this particular issue and to the dream landscape itself.

It is only because you seem to expect dream experience to be like daily life that you find so many dreams chaotic.  Normally a tree does not change into a peacock, for example.  If you remember such a dream event, it seems meaningless in the morning.