Sessions 804 and 805 from Seth's "The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events"

Session 804

The body is a spiritual, psychic, and social statement, biologically spoken. It is obviously private, yet it cannot be concealed, in that "it is where you are," in usual terms.

The individual body is what it is because it exists in the context of others like it. By this I mean that a given present body presupposes a biological past of like creatures. It presupposes contemporaries. If, for example, one adult human being were perceived by an alien from another world, certain facts would be apparent. Even though such an alien came upon a lone member of your species in otherwise uninhabited land, the alien could make certain assumptions from the individual's appearance and behavior.

If the "earthling" spoke, the alien would of course instantly know that you were communicating creatures, and in the vocal sounds recognize patterns that contained purpose and intent. To one extent or another, all creatures use language, implying a far vaster sociobiological relationship than is usually supposed. From [the earthling's] appearance the alien would be able to deduce — if it did not already know — the proportions of the various elements upon your planet; this being surmised from your method of locomotion, appendages, and the nature of your physical vision.

While each individual springs privately into the world at birth, then, each birth also represents quite literally an effort — a triumphant one — on the part of each member of each species, for the delicate balance of life requires for each birth quite precise conditions that no one species can guarantee alone, even to its own kind. The grain must grow. The animals must produce. The plants must do their part. Photosynthesis, in those terms, reigns.

The seasons must retain some stability. The rains must fall, but not too much. The storms must rage, but not too devastatingly. Behind all of this lies a biological and psychic cooperative venture.  All of this could be perceived by our hypothetical alien from one lone human individual; and we will return to our alien later on.

Cells possess "social" characteristics. They have a tendency to unite with others. They naturally communicate. They naturally want to move. In making such statements I am not personifying the cell, for the desire for communication and motion does not belong to man, or even animals, alone. Man's desire to journey into other worlds is in its way as natural as the plant's urge to turn its leaves toward the sun.

Man's physical world, with all of its civilizations and cultural aspects, and even with its technologies and sciences, basically represents the species' innate drive to communicate, to move outward, to create, and to objectify sensed inner realities. The most private life imaginable is a very social affair. The most secluded recluse must still depend upon the biological sociability of not only his own body cells, but of the natural world with all of its creatures. The body, then, no matter how private, is also a public, social, biological statement. A spoken sentence has a certain structure in any language. It presupposes a mouth and a tongue, the kind of physical organization necessary; a mind; a certain kind of world in which sounds have meaning; and a very precise, quite practical knowledge of the nature of sounds, the combination of their patterns, the use of repetition, and a knowledge of the nervous system. Few of my readers possess such conscious knowledge, yet the majority speak quite well.

In one way or another, therefore, it certainly seems that your body possesses a kind of quite pragmatic information, and acts upon it. You can express almost any idea that you want in vocal terms, even if you have hardly any conception at all of the way in which your own speech is executed.

The body is geared then to act. It is pragmatically practical, and above all it wants to explore and to communicate. Communication implies a social nature. The body has within it inherently everything necessary for its own defense. The body itself will tease the child to speak, to crawl and walk, to seek its fellows. Through biological communication the child's cells are made aware of its physical environment, the temperature, air pressure, weather conditions, food supplies — and the body reacts to these conditions, making some adjustments with great rapidity.

At cellular levels the world exists with a kind of social interchange, in which the birth and death of cells are known to all others, and in which the death of a frog and a star gain equal weight. But at your level of activity your thoughts, feelings, and intents, however private, form part of the inner environment of communication. This inner environment is as pertinent and vital to the species' well-being as is the physical one. It represents the psychic, mass bank of potential, even as the planet provides a physical bank of potential. When there is an earthquake in another area of the world, the land mass in your own country is in one way or another affected. When there are psychic earthquakes in other areas of the world, then you are also affected, and usually to the same degree.

In the same way, if one portion of your own body is injured, then other portions feel the effects of the wound. An earthquake can be a disaster in the area where it occurs, even though its existence corrects imbalances, and therefore promotes the life of the planet. Emergency actions are quite rigorous in the immediate area of an earthquake, and aid is sent in from other countries. When an area of the body "erupts," there are also emergency measures taken locally, and aid sent from other portions of the body to afflicted parts.

The physical eruption, while it may appear to be a disaster in the area of the disease, is also, however, a part of the body's defense system, taken to insure the whole balance of the body. Biologically, illness therefore represents the overall body defense system at work.

I am trying to put this simply — but without some illnesses, the body could not endure. Give us a moment. . . First of all, the body must be in a state of constant change, making decisions far too fast for you to follow, adjusting hormonal levels, maintaining balances between all of its systems; not only in relationship to itself — the body — but to an environment that is also in constant change. At biological levels the body often produces its own "preventative medicine," or "inoculations," by seeking out, for example, new or foreign substances in its environment [that are] due to nature, science or technology; it assimilates such properties in small doses, coming down with an "illness" which, left alone, would soon vanish as the body utilized what it could [of it], or socialized "a seeming invader”.

The person might feel indisposed, but in such ways the body assimilates and uses properties that would otherwise be called alien ones. It immunizes itself through such methods. The body, however, exists with the mind to contend with — and the mind produces an inner environment of concepts. The cells that compose the body do not try to make sense of the cultural world. They rely upon your interpretation, therefore, for the existence of threats of a non-biological nature. So they depend upon your assessment.

If that assessment correlates with biological ones, you have a good working relationship with the body. It can react swiftly and clearly. When you sense threat or danger for which the body can find no biological correlation, even as through cellular communication it scans the environment physically, then it must rely upon your assessment and react to danger conditions. The body will, therefore, react to imagined dangers to some degree, as well as to those that are biologically pertinent. Its defense system often becomes overexerted as a result.

The body is, therefore, quite well equipped to deal with its physical stance in the physical world, and its defense systems are unerring in that respect. Your conscious mind, however, directs your temporal perception and interprets that perception, organizing it into mental patterns. The body, again, must depend upon those interpretations. The biological basis of all life is a loving, divine and cooperative one, and presupposes a safe physical stance from which any member of any species feels actively free to seek out its needs and to communicate with others of its kind.

It is fashionable to believe that the animals do not possess imagination, but this is a quite erroneous belief. They anticipate mating, for example, before its time. They all learn through experience, and despite all of your concepts, learning is impossible without imagination at any level.

In your terms, the imagination of the animals is limited. Theirs is not merely confined to the elements of previous experience, however. They can imagine events that have never happened to them. Man's abilities in this respect are far more complicated, for in his imagination he deals with probabilities. In any given period of time, with one physical body, he can anticipate or perform an infinitely vaster number of events — each one remaining probable until he activates it.

The body, responding to his thoughts, feelings, and beliefs, has much more data to deal with, therefore, and must have a clear area in which concise action is possible.

The body's defense system is automatic, and yet .to a certain degree it is a secondary rather than primary system, coming into mobilization as such only when the body is threatened.

The body's main purpose is not only to survive but to maintain a quality of existence at certain levels, and that quality itself promotes health and fulfillment. A definite, biologically pertinent fear alerts the body, and allows it to react completely and naturally. You might be reading a newspaper headline, for example, as you cross a busy street. Long before you are consciously aware of the circumstances, your body might leap out of the path of an approaching car. The body is doing what it is supposed to do. Though consciously you were not afraid, there was a biologically pertinent fear that was acted upon.

If, however, you dwell mentally in a generalized environment of fear, the body is given no clear line of action, allowed no appropriate response. Look at it this way: An animal, not necessarily just a wild one in some native forest, but an ordinary dog or cat, reacts in a certain fashion. It is alert to everything in its environment. A cat does not anticipate danger from a penned dog four blocks away, however, nor bother wondering what would happen if that dog were to escape and find the cat's cozy yard.

Many people, however, do not pay attention to everything in their environments, but through their beliefs concentrate only upon "the ferocious dog four blocks away." That is, they do not respond to what is physically present or perceivable in either space or time, but instead [dwell] upon the threats that may or may not exist, ignoring at the same time other pertinent data that are immediately at hand.

The mind then signals threat — but a threat that is nowhere physically present, so that the body cannot clearly respond. It therefore reacts to a pseudothreatening situation, and is caught between gears, so to speak, with resulting biological confusion. The body's responses must be specific.

The overall sense of health, vitality, and resiliency is a generalized condition of contentment — brought about, however, by multitudinous specific responses. Left alone, the body can defend itself against any disease, but it cannot defend itself appropriately against an exaggerated general fear of disease on the individual's part. It must mirror your own feelings and assessments. Usually, now, your entire medical systems literally generate as much disease as is cured — for you are everywhere hounded by the symptoms of various dis eases, and filled with the fear of disease, overwhelmed by what seems to be the body's propensity toward illness — and nowhere is the body's vitality or natural defense system stressed.

Private disease, then, happens also in a social context. This context is the result of personal and mass beliefs that are intertwined at all cultural levels, and so to that extent serve private and public purposes.

The illnesses generally attributed to all different ages are involved. Those of the elderly, again, fit in with your social and cultural beliefs, the structure of your family life. Old animals have their own dignity, and so should old men and women. Senility is a mental and physical epidemic — a needless one. You "catch" it because when you are young you believe that old people cannot perform. There are no inoculations against beliefs, so when young people with such beliefs grow old they become "victims."

The kinds of diseases change through historical periods. Some become fashionable, others go out of style. All epidemics, however, are mass statements both biologically and psychically. They point to mass beliefs that have brought about certain physical conditions that are abhorrent at all levels. They often go hand-in-hand with war, and represent biological protests.

Whenever the conditions of life are such that its quality is threatened, there will be such a mass statement. The quality of life must be at a certain level so that the individuals of a species — of any and all species — can develop. In your species the spiritual, mental and psychic abilities add a dimension that is biologically pertinent.

There simply must be, for example, a freedom to express ideas, an individual tendency, a worldwide social and political context in which each individual can develop his or her abilities and contribute to the species as a whole. Such a climate depends, however, upon many ideas not universally accepted — and yet the species is so formed that the biological importance of ideas cannot be stressed too strongly.

More and more, the quality of your lives is formed through the subjective realities of your feelings and mental constructions. Again, beliefs that foster despair are biologically destructive. They cause the physical system to shut down. If mass action against appalling social or political conditions is not effective, then other means are taken, and these are often in the guise of epidemics or natural disasters. The blight is wiped out in one way or another.

Such conditions, however, are the results of beliefs, which are mental, and so the most vital work must always be done in that area.

 

Session 805

 

An animal has a sense of its own biological integrity. So does a child. In all forms of life each individual is born into a world already provided for it, with circumstances favorable to its growth and development; a world in which its own existence rests upon the equally valid existence of all other individuals and species, so that each contributes to nature's whole.

In that environment there is a cooperative sociability of a biological nature that is understood by the animals in their way, and taken for granted by the young of your own species. The means are given so that the needs of the individual can be met. The granting of those needs furthers the development of the individual, its species, and by inference all others in the fabric of nature.

Survival, of course, is important, but it is not the prime purpose of a species, in that it is a necessary means by which that species can attain its main goals. Of course [a species] must survive to do so, but it will, however, purposefully avoid survival if the conditions are not practically favorable to maintain the quality of life or existence that is considered basic.

A species that senses a lack of this quality can in one way or another destroy its offspring — not because they could not survive otherwise, but because the quality of that survival would bring about vast suffering, for example, so distorting the nature of life as to almost make a mockery of it. Each species seeks for the development of its abilities and capacities in a framework in which safety is a medium for action. Danger in that context exists under certain conditions clearly known to the animals, clearly defined: The prey is known, for example, as is the hunter. But even the natural prey of another animal does not fear the "hunter" when the hunter animal is full of belly, nor will the hunter then attack.

There are also emotional interactions among the animals that completely escape you, and biological mechanisms, so that animals felled as natural prey by other animals "understand" their part in nature. They do not anticipate death before it happens, however. The fatal act propels the consciousness out from the flesh, so that in those terms it is merciful.

During their lifetimes animals in their natural state enjoy their vigor and accept their worth. They regulate their own births — and their own deaths. The quality of their lives is such that their abilities are challenged. They enjoy contrasts: that between rest and motion, heat and cold, being in direct contact with natural phenomena that everywhere quickens their experience. They will migrate if necessary to seek conditions more auspicious. They are aware of approaching natural disasters, and when possible will leave such areas. They will protect their own, and according to circumstances and conditions they will tend their own wounded. Even in contests between young and old males for control of a group, under natural conditions the loser is seldom killed. Dangers are pinpointed clearly so that bodily reactions are concise.

The animal knows he has the right to exist, and a place in the fabric of nature. This sense of biological integrity supports him.

Man, on the other hand, has more to contend with. He must deal with beliefs and feelings often so ambiguous that no clear line of action seems possible. The body often does not know how to react. If you believe that the body is sinful, for example, you cannot expect to be happy, and health will most likely elude you, for your dark beliefs will blemish the psychological and biological integrity with which you were born.

The species is in a state of transition, one of many. This one began, generally speaking, when the species tried to step apart from nature in order to develop the unique kind of consciousness that is presently your own. That consciousness is not a finished product, however, but one meant to change, [to] evolve and develop." Certain artificial divisions were made along the way that must now be dispensed with.

You must return, wiser creatures, to the nature that spawned you — not only as loving caretakers but as partners with the other species of the earth. You must discover once again the spirituality of your biological heritage. The majority of accepted beliefs — religious, scientific, and cultural — have tended to stress a sense of powerlessness, impotence, and impending doom — a picture in which man and his world is an accidental production with little meaning, isolated yet seemingly ruled by a capricious God. Life is seen as "a valley of tears" — almost as a low-grade infection from which the soul can be cured only by death.

Religious, scientific, medical, and cultural communications stress the existence of danger, minimize the purpose of the species or of any individual member of it, or see mankind as the one erratic, half-insane member of an otherwise orderly realm of nature. Any or all of the above beliefs are held by various systems of thought. All of these, however, strain the individual's biological sense of integrity, reinforce ideas of danger, and shrink the area of psychological safety that is necessary to maintain the quality possible in life. The body's defense systems become confused to varying degrees.

I do not intend to give a treatise upon the biological structures of the body and their interworkings, but only to add such information in that line that is not currently known, and is otherwise important to the ideas I have in mind. I am far more concerned [with] more basic issues. The body's defenses will take care of themselves if they are allowed to, and if the psychological air is cleared of the true "carriers" of disease.

CHAPTER 2

"MASS MEDITATIONS." "HEALTH" PLANS FOR DISEASE. EPIDEMICS OF BELIEFS, AND EFFECTIVE MENTAL "INOCULATIONS" AGAINST DESPAIR

While in this book I will point out some of the unfortunate areas of private and mass experience, I will also provide some suggestions for effective solutions. "You get what you concentrate upon." Your mental images bring about their own fulfillment. These are ancient dictums, but you must understand the ways in which your mass communication systems amplify both the "positive and the negative" issues.

I may for a while stress the ways in which individually, and as a civilization, you have undermined your own feelings of safety; yet I will also give you methods to reinforce those necessary feelings of biological integrity and spiritual comprehension that can vastly increase your spiritual and physical existence.

Your beliefs have generated feelings of unworth. Having artificially separated yourselves from nature, you do not trust it, but often experience it as an adversary. Your religions granted man a soul, while denying any to other species. Your bodies then were relegated to nature and your souls to God, who stood immaculately apart from His creations.

Your scientific beliefs tell you that your entire world happened accidentally. Your religions tell you that man is sinful: The body is not to be trusted; the senses can lead you astray. In this maze of beliefs you have largely lost a sense of your own worth and purpose. A generalized fear and suspicion is generated, and life too often becomes stripped of any heroic qualities. The body cannot react to generalized threats. It is, therefore, put under constant strain in such circumstances, and seeks to specify the danger. It is geared to act in your protection. It builds up strong stresses, therefore, so that on many occasions a specific disease or threat situation is "manufactured" to rid the body of a tension grown too strong to bear.

Many of my readers are familiar with private meditation, when concentration is focused in one particular area. There are many methods and schools of thought here, but a highly suggestive state of mind results, in which spiritual, mental, and physical goals are sought. It is impossible to meditate without a goal, for that intent is itself a purpose. Unfortunately, many of your public health programs, and commercial statements through the various media, provide you with mass meditations of a most deplorable kind. I refer to those in which the specific symptoms of various diseases are given, in which the individual is further told to examine the body with those symptoms in mind. I also refer to those statements that just as unfortunately specify diseases for which the individual may experience no symptoms of an observable kind, but is cautioned that these disastrous physical events may be happening despite his or her feelings of good health. Here the generalized fears fostered by religious, scientific, and cultural beliefs are often given as blueprints of diseases in which a person can find a specific focus — the individual can say: "Of course, I feel listless, or panicky, or unsafe since I have such-and-such a disease."

The breast cancer suggestions associated with self-examinations have caused more cancers than any treatments have cured (most emphatically). They involve intense meditation of the body, and adverse imagery that itself affects the bodily cells. Public health announcements about high blood pressure themselves raise the blood pressure of millions of television viewers (even more emphatically).

Your current ideas of preventative medicine, therefore, generate the very kind of fear that causes disease. They all undermine the individual's sense of bodily security and increase stress, while offering the body a specific, detailed disease plan. But most of all, they operate to increase the individual sense of alienation from the body, and to promote a sense of powerlessness and duality.

Your "medical commercials" are equally disease-promoting. Many, meaning to offer you relief through a product, instead actually promote the condition through suggestion, thereby generating a need for the product itself.

Headache remedies are a case in point here. Nowhere do any medically-oriented commercial or public service announcements mention the body's natural defenses, its integrity, vitality, or strength. Nowhere in your television or radio matter is any emphasis put upon the healthy. Medical statistics deal with the diseased. Studies upon the healthy are not carried out.

More and more foods, drugs, and natural environmental conditions are being added to the list of disease-causing elements. Different reports place dairy products, red meats, coffee, tea, eggs, and fats on the list. Generations before you managed to subsist on many such foods, and they were in fact promoted as additive to health. Indeed, man almost seems to be allergic to his own natural environment, a prey to the weather itself.

It is true that your food contains chemicals it did not in years past. Yet within reason man is biologically capable of assimilating such materials, and using them to his advantage.

When man feels powerless, however, and in a state of generalized fear; he can even turn the most natural earthly ingredients against himself. Your television, and your arts and sciences as well, add up to mass meditations. In your culture, at least, the educated in the literary arts provide you with novels featuring antiheroes, and often portray an individual existence [as being] without meaning, in which no action is sufficient to mitigate the private puzzlement or anguish.

Many — not all — plotless novels or movies are the result of this belief in man's powerlessness. In that context no action is heroic, and man is everywhere the victim of an alien universe. On the other hand your common, unlettered, violent television dramas do indeed provide a service, for they imaginatively specify a generalized fear in a given situation, which is then resolved through drama. Individual action counts. The plots may be stereotyped or the acting horrendous, but in the most conventional terms the "good" man wins.

Such programs do indeed pick up the generalized fears of the nation, but they also represent folk dramas — disdained by the intelligentsia — in which the common man can portray heroic capabilities, act concisely toward a desired end, and triumph.

Those programs often portray your cultural world in exaggerated terms, and most resolution is indeed through violence. Yet your more educated beliefs lead you to an even more pessimistic picture, in which even the violent action of men and women who are driven to the extreme serves no purpose. The individual must feel that his actions count. He is driven to violent action only as a last resort — and illness often is that last resort.

Your television dramas, the cops-and-robbers shows, the spy productions, are simplistic, yet they relieve tension in a way that your public health announcements cannot do. The viewer can say: "Of course I feel panicky, unsafe, and frightened, because I live in such a violent world." The generalized fear can find a reason [for its existence]. But the programs at least provide a resolution dramatically set, while the public health announcements continue to generate unease. Those mass meditations therefore reinforce negative conditions.

In the overall, then, violent shows provide a service, in that they usually promote the sense of a man's or a woman's individual power over a given set of circumstances. At best the public service announcements introduce the doctor as mediator: You are supposed to take your body to a doctor as you take your car to a garage, to have its parts serviced. Your body is seen as a vehicle out of control, that needs constant scrutiny.

The doctor is like a biological mechanic, who knows your body far better than you. Now these medical beliefs are intertwined with your economic and cultural structures, so you cannot lay the blame upon medical men or their profession alone. Your economic well-being is also a part of your personal reality. Many dedicated doctors use medical technology with spiritual understanding, and they are themselves the victims of the beliefs they hold.

If you do not buy headache potions, your uncle or your neighbor may be out of business and not able to support his family, and therefore lack the means to buy your wares. You cannot disconnect one area of life from another. En masse, your private beliefs form your cultural reality. Your society is not a thing in itself apart from you, but the result of the individual beliefs of each person in it. There is no stratum of society that you do not in one way or another affect. Your religions stress sin. Your medical profession stresses disease. Your orderly sciences stress the chaotic and accidental theories of creation. Your psychologies stress men as victims of their backgrounds. Your most advanced thinkers emphasize man's rape of the planet, or focus upon the future disaster that will overtake the world, or see men once again as victims of the stars.

Many of your resurrected occult schools speak of a recommended death of desire, the annihilation of the ego, for the transmutation of physical elements to finer levels. In all such cases the clear spiritual and biological integrity of the individual suffers, and the precious immediacy of your moments is largely lost.

Earth life is seen as murky, a dim translation of greater existence, rather than portrayed as the unique, creative, living experience that it should be. The body becomes disoriented, sabotaged. The clear lines of communication between spirit and body become cluttered. Individually and en masse, diseases and conditions result that are meant to lead you into other realizations.

The Dream State from Seth's "The Nature of the Psyche" Session 756

Session 756

Your “dreaming” psyche seems to be dreaming only because you do not recognize that particular state of awareness as your own.  The “dreaming” psyche is actually as awake as you are in your normal waking life.  The organization of wakefulness is different, however.  You come into dreaming from a different angle, so to speak.

The “off-center” quality sensed in dream activity, the different viewpoints, the perspective alterations, all can add to a chaotic picture when the dream state is viewed from the waking one.

Centuries ago, in your terms, words and images had a closer relationship – now somewhat tarnished – and this older relationship appears in the dream fabric.  We will use English here as an example.  The great descriptive nature of names, for instance, can give you an indication of the unity of image and word as they appear in your dreams.  Once, a man who tailored clothes was named “Tailor”.  A man who was a robber was called “Robber”.  If you were the son of a man with a certain name, then “son of” was simply added so you had “Robberson”.  Each reader can think of many such examples.

Now, names are not as descriptive.  You may have a dream, however, in which you see a tailor shop.  The tailor may be dancing or dying or getting married.  Later, in waking life, you may discover that a friend of yours, a Mr Taylor, has a party, or dies, or gets married, whatever the case may be; yet you might never connect the dream with the later event because you did not understand the way that words and images can be united in your dreams.

Your waking life is the result of the most precise kind of organization, held competently and with amazing clarity.  While each person views that reality from a slightly different focus, still it occurs within certain ranges or frequencies.  You bring it into clear focus in almost the same way that you adjust your television picture, only in this case not only sound and images are synchronized, but phenomena of far greater complexity.  Following this analogy, everyone sees a slightly different picture of reality, and follows his or her own program – yet all of the “sets” are the same.

When you dream, however, you are to some extent experiencing reality from a different “set” entirely.  Now, when you try to adjust your dreaming set in the same way that you would the waking one, you end up with static and blurred images.  The set itself, however, is quite as effective as the one you use when you are awake, and it has a far greater range.  It can bring in many programs.  When you watch your ordinary television program, perhaps on a Saturday afternoon, you view the program as an observer.  Let me give you an example.

Ruburt and Joseph often watch old Star Trek reruns as they eat their evening meal.  They sit quite comfortably on their living room couch, with dinner on the coffee table, surrounded by all of the dear homey paraphernalia that is familiar to your society.

As they sit thus comfortably ensconced, they observe dramas in which planets explode, and otherworld intelligences rise to challenge or to help the dauntless captain of the good ship Enterprise and the fearless “Spock” – but none of this threatens our friends, Ruburt and Joseph.  They drink their coffee and eat their dessert.

Now:  Your normal waking reality can be compared to a kind of television drama in which you participate directly in all of the dramas presented.  You create them to begin with.  You form your private and joint adventures, and bring them into experience by using your physical apparatus – your body – in a particular way, tuned in to a large programming area in which, however, there are many different stations.  In your terms, these stations come alive.  You are the drama that you experience, and all of your activities seem to revolve about you.  You are also the perceiver.

In the dream state, it is as if you have a still-different television set that is, however, connected with your own.  Using it, you can perceive events not only from your own viewpoint, but from other focuses.  Using that set, you can leap from station to station, so to speak – not simply perceiving, but experiencing what is happening in other times and places.

Events, then, are organized in a different fashion.  Not only can you experience dramas in which you are intimately involved, as in waking life, but your range of activities is multiplied so that you can view events, “from outside” your own usual context.  You can look down at a drama on the one hand, for example, and participate in it as well.

When you are dealing with normal waking reality, you are operating at one level of the many that are native to your psyche.  When you are dreaming, from your viewpoint you are entering other levels of reality quite as native to your psyche, but usually you are still experiencing those events through your current “waking station”.  The dreams that you remember are colored or altered or even censored to a certain extent.  There is no inherent psychological or biological necessity for this.  Your ideas and beliefs, however, about the nature of reality, and sanity, have resulted in such a schism.

Let us return to our friends, Ruburt and Joseph, watching Star Trek as each of you watch your own favorite programs.

Ruburt and Joseph know that Star Trek is not “real”.  Planets can explode on the television screen, and Ruburt will not spill one drop of coffee.  The cozy living room is quite safe from the imaginary catastrophes that are occurring just a few feet from the couch.  Yet in a way the program reflects certain beliefs of your society in general, and so it is like a specialized mass waking dream – real but not real.  For a moment, though, let us change the program to your favorite cops-and-robbers show.  A woman is shot down in the street.  Now this drama becomes “more real”, more immediately probable, and less comfortable.  So watching such a program, you may feel slightly threatened yourself, yet still largely unconcerned.

Some of my friends may not watch such programs at all, but instead look at wholesome sagas, or religious dramas.  A preacher may stand golden-faced, earnest-eyed, extolling the merits of goodness and damning the legions of the devil – and to some of my readers that devil, unseen, never appearing, may nevertheless seem quite real.

You form certain focuses, then.  You will blithely ignore certain televised dangers and sheer good adventure, while others may strike you to the heart as “too real”.  So in your waking and dreaming experiences, you will make the same kind of distinctions.  You will be touched or untouched by waking or dreaming events according to the significance you place upon them.

If you do not like a television program, you can switch to another with a mere flick of the wrist.  If you do not like your own physical experience, you can also change to another, more beneficial station – but only if you recognize the fact that you are the producer.

In the dream state, many people have learned to escape from a bad dream by waking up, or altering the focus of consciousness.  Ruburt and Joseph do not feel threatened, again, by Star Trek.  The program does not make them feel less safe.  When you are in the middle of a frightening physical experience, however, or caught in the throes of a nightmare, then you wish you knew how to “change the station”.

You can often get carried away by a television drama, so that for a moment you forget that it is “not real”, and in your concentration upon it you can momentarily ignore the greater reality about you.

Sometimes you are deliciously frightened by a horror program, for example.  You may feel compelled to see how it comes out, and find yourself unable to go to bed until the horrendous situation is resolved.  All the time you know that salvation is nearby: You can always switch off the program.  If someone watching a gory midnight special suddenly screams or shouts or leaps up from the chair, how comical this seems, because the action is appropriate not to the “real” situation, but geared instead to a pseudo drama.  The yelling and screaming will have absolutely no effect upon the program’s actors, and will alter the drama not one whit.  The appropriate action would be to turn the station off.

In this case, the frightened perceiver knows full well that the terrible events on the screen will not suddenly explode into the living room.  When you become caught in frightening physical events, however, it is equally foolhardy to yell or shout or stamp your feet, because that is not where the action is.  Again, you have only to change the station.  But often you become so engrossed in your life situation that you do not realize the inappropriateness of your response.

In this case you are yourself the programmer, and the true action is not where it appears to be – in the exterior events – but instead in the psyche, where you are writing and performing the drama.  In the dream state, you are writing and performing many such dramas.

Seth: The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events Session 803

Session 803

Your scientists are beginning to understand man’s physical relationship with nature.  The species is obviously a part of nature and not apart from it.

Environmental questions are being raised about man’s effects upon the world in which he lives.  There is, however, an inner environment that connects all consciousnesses that dwell upon your planet, in whatever form.  This mental or psychic – or in any case nonphysical – environment is ever in a state of flux and motion.  That activity provides you with all exterior phenomena.

Your sense perception, physically speaking, is a result of behavior on the part of organs that seem to you to have no reality outside of their relationship with you.  Those organs are themselves composed of atoms and molecules with their own consciousnesses.  They have, then, their own states of sensation and cognition.  They work for you allowing you to perceive physical reality.

Your ears certainly seem to be permanent appendages, and so do your eyes.  You say: “My eyes are blue,” or “My ears are small”.  The physical matter of those sense organs changes constantly, however, with you none the wiser.  While your body appears quite dependable, solid, [and] steady, you are not aware of the constant interchanges that occur between it and the physical environment.  It does not bother you one whit that the physical substance of your body is made up of completely different atoms and molecules than it was composed of seven years ago, [say], or that your familiar hands are actually innocent of any smallest smidgen of matter that composed them [even in recent times past].

You perceive your body as solid.  Again, the very senses that make such a deduction are the result of the behavior of atoms and molecules literally coming together to form the organs, filling a pattern of flesh.  All other objects that you perceive are formed in their own way in the same fashion.

The physical world that you recognize is made up of invisible patterns.  These patterns are “plastic”, in that while they exist, their final form is a matter of probabilities directed by consciousness.  Your senses perceive these patterns in their own ways.  The patterns themselves can be “activated” in innumerable fashions.  There is something out there to observe.

Your sense apparatus determines what form that something will take, however.  The mass world rises up before your eyes, but your eyes are part of that mass world.  You cannot see your thoughts, so you do not realize that they have shape and form, even as, say, clouds do.  There are currents of thought as there are currents of air, and the mental patterns of men’s feelings and thoughts rise up like flames from a fire, or steam from hot water, to fall like ashes or like rain.

All elements of the interior invisible environment work together, and they form the temporal weather patterns that are exteriorized mental states, presenting you locally and en masse, then, with a physical version of man’s emotional states.

The physical planet is obviously also ever-changing while it is operationally or realistically or pragmatically relatively stable.  The physical matter of the planet is composed of literally infinite hordes of consciousnesses – each experiencing its own reality while adding to the overall cooperative venture.

Natural disasters represent an understandably prejudiced concept, in which the vast creative rejuvenating elements important to planetary life, and therefore to mankind, are ignored.  The stability of the planet rests upon such changes and alterations, even as the body’s stability is dependent upon, say, the birth and death of the cells.

It is quite obvious that people must die – not only because otherwise you would overpopulate your world into extinction, but because the nature of consciousness requires new experience, challenge, and accomplishment.  This is everywhere apparent in nature itself.  If there were no death, you would have to invent it – for the context of that selfhood would be as limited as the experience of a great sculptor given but one hunk of stone.

The sculptor’s creation is pragmatically realistic, in that it exists as an object, and can be quite legitimately perceived, as can your world.  The sculptor’s statue, however, comes from the inner environment, the patterns of probabilities.  These patterns are not themselves inactive.  They are possessed by the desire to be-actualized.  Behind all realities there are mental states.  These always seek form, though again there are other forms than those you recognize.

A chair is a chair for your purposes.  As Ruburt speaks for me he sits in one.  As you read this book you most probably lounge on a chair or couch or bench – all quite sturdy and real.  The atoms and molecules within those chairs and couches are quite alert, though you do not grant them the quality of life.  When children play ring-around-the-rosy, they form living circles in the air.  In that game they enjoy the motion of their bodies, but they do not identify with those swirling circles.  The atoms and molecules that make up a chair play a different kind of ring-around-the-rosy, and are involved in constant motion, forming a certain pattern that you perceive as a chair.

The differences in motion are so divergent that to you the chair, like your body, appears permanent.  The atoms and molecules, like the children, enjoy their motion – solidly sketched in space from your perspective, however, with no “idea” that you consider that motion a chair, or so use it.

You perceive the atoms’ activity in that fashion.  [Nevertheless] the agreement takes place at mental levels, and is never completely “set”, though it appears to be.  No one perceives the same chair [all of the time], though perhaps a given chair will seem to be “the same one” seen from different angles.

The dance of the atoms and molecules is continuous in your area.  In greater terms, any given chair is never the same chair.  All of this must be taken into consideration when we discuss mass events.

The scientist probing the brain of an idiot or a genius will find only the physical matter of the brain itself.

Not one idea will be discovered residing in the brain cells.  You can try to convey an idea, you can feel its effects, but you cannot see it as you can the chair.  Only a fool would say that ideas were nonexistent, however, or deny their importance.

You cannot find any given dream location, either, within the brain itself.  The solid matter of your world is the result of the play of your senses upon an inner dimension of activity that exists as legitimately, and yet as tantalizingly hidden, as an idea or a dream location.

It is easy for you to see that seeds bring forth the fruit of the earth, each [of] their own kind.  No seed is identical to any other, yet generally speaking there are species that serve to unite them.  You do not mistake an orange for a grape.  In the same way ideas or thoughts form general patterns, bringing forth in your world certain kinds of events.  In this respect your thoughts and feelings “seed” physical reality, bringing forth materializations.

You operate quite nicely politically, living in villages, townships, countries, states, and so forth, each with certain customs and local ordinances.  These in no way affect the land itself.  They are designations for practical purposes, and they imply organization of intent or affiliation at one level.  They are political patterns, invisible but highly effective.  There are, however, far more vigorous invisible mental patterns, into which the thoughts and feelings of mankind are organized – or, naturally, organize themselves.

Each person’s thoughts flow into that formation, forming part of the earth’s psychic atmosphere.  From that atmosphere flows the natural earthly patterns from which your seasons emerge with all of their variety and effects.  You are never victims of natural disasters, though it may seem that you are, for you have your hand in forming them.  You are creatively involved in the earth’s cycles.  No one can be born for you, or die for you, and yet no birth or death is really an isolated event, but one in which the entire planet participates.  In personal terms, again, each species is concerned not only with survival but with the quality of its life and experience.

In those terms, natural disasters ultimately end up righting a condition that earlier blighted the desired quality of life, so that adjustments were made.

The “victims” choose to participate in those conditions at spiritual, psychological, and biological levels.  Many of those who are counted among the fatalities might otherwise die of extended illnesses, for example.  At cellular levels such knowledge is available, and in one way or another imparted, often in dreams, to the individual.  Conscious comprehension need not follow, for many people know such things, and pretend not to know them at the same time.

Others have finished with their challenges; they want to die and are looking for an excuse – a face-saving device.  However, those who choose such deaths want to die in terms of drama, in the middle of their activities, and are in a strange way filled with the exultant inner knowledge of life’s strength even at the point of death.  At last they identify with the power of nature that seemingly destroyed them.

That identification often brings about in death – but not always – an added acceleration of consciousness, and involves such individuals in a kind of “group death experience”, where all of the victims more or less embark into another level of reality “at the same time”.

Those people were aware just beneath consciousness of the possibilities of such an event long before the disaster occurred, and could until the last moment choose to avoid the encounter.  Animals know of weather conditions ahead of time, as old tales say.  The perception is a biological part of your heritage also.  The body is prepared, though consciously it seems you are ignorant.

There are innumerable relationships that exist between the interior environment of the body and the weather patterns.  The ancient feelings of identification with storms are quite valid, and in that respect the “realism” of feelings is far superior to the realism of logic.  When a person feels a part of a storm, those feelings speak a literal truth.  Logic deals with exterior conditions, with cause-and-effect relationships.  Intuitions deal with immediate experience of the most intimate nature, with subjective motions and activities that in your terms move far quicker than the speed of light, and with simultaneous events that your cause-and-effect level is far too slow to perceive.

In that regard also, the activities of the inner environment are too fast for you to follow intellectually.  Your intuitions, however, can give you clues to such behavior.  A country is responsible for its own droughts, earthquakes, floods, hurricanes – and for its own harvests and rich display of products, its industry and cultural achievements, and each of these elements is related to each other.

If the quality of life that is considered spiritually and biologically necessary fails, then adjustments occur.  A political problem might be altered by a natural disaster if political means fail.  On the other hand, the rousing creative energies of the people will emerge.

Excellence will show itself through the arts, cultural creativity, technological or sociological accomplishments.  The species tries to fulfill its great capacities.  Each physical body in its own way is like the world.  It has its own defenses and abilities, and each portion of it strives for a quality of existence that will bring to the smallest parts of it the spiritual and biological fulfillment of its own nature.

Seth: The Nature of the Psyche - Session 755

Session 755

When I use the term “psyche”, many of you will immediately wonder about my definition.

Any word, simply by being thought, written or spoken, immediately implies a specification.  In your daily reality it is very handy to distinguish one thing from another by giving each item a name.  When you are dealing with subjective experience, however, definitions can often serve to limit rather than express a given experience.  Obviously the psyche is not a thing.  It does not have a beginning or ending.  It cannot be seen or touched in normal terms.  It is useless, therefore, to attempt any description of it through usual vocabulary, for your language primarily allows you to identify physical rather than nonphysical experience.

I am not saying that words cannot be used to describe the psyche, but they cannot define it.  It is futile to question: “What is the difference between my psyche and my soul, my entity and my greater being?” for all of these are terms used in an effort to express the greater portions of your own experience that you sense within yourself.  Your use of language may make you impatient for definitions, however.  Hopefully this book will allow you some intimate awareness, some definite experience, that will acquaint you with the nature of your own psyche, and then you will see that its reality escapes all definitions, defies all categorizing, and shoves aside with exuberant creativity all attempts to wrap it up in a neat package.

When you begin a physical journey, you feel yourself distinct from the land through which you travel.  No matter how far you journey – on a motorcycle, in a car or plane, or on foot – by bicycle or camel, or truck or vessel, still you are the wanderer, and the land or ocean or desert is the environment through which you roam.  When you begin your travels into your own psyche, however, everything changes.  You are still the wanderer, the journeyman or journey-woman – but you are also the vehicle and the environment.  You form the roads, your method of travel, the hills or mountains or oceans, as well as the hills, farms, and villages of the self, or of the psyche, as you go along.

When in colonial times men and women traveled westward across the continent of North America, many of them took it on faith that the land did indeed continue beyond – for example – towering mountains.  When you travel as pioneers through your own reality, you create each blade of grass, each inch of land, each sunset and sunrise, each oasis, friendly cabin or enemy encounter as you go along.

Now if you are looking for simple definitions to explain the psyche, I will be of no help.  If you want to experience the splendid creativity of your own being, however, then I will use methods that will arouse your greatest adventuresomeness, your boldest faith in yourself, and I will paint pictures of your psyche that will lead you to experience even its broadest reaches, if you so desire.  The psyche, then, is not a known land.  It is not simply an alien land, to which or through which you can travel.  It is not a completed or nearly complete subjective universe already there for you to explore.  It is, instead, an ever-forming state of being, in which your present sense of existence resides.  You create it and it creates you.

It creates in physical terms that you recognize.  On the other hand, you create physical time for your psyche, for without you there would be no experience of the seasons, their coming and their passing.

There would be no experience of what Ruburt calls “the dear privacy of the moment”, so if one portion of your being wants to rise above the solitary march of the moments, other parts of your psyche rush, delighted, into that particular time-focus that is your own.  As you now desire to understand the timeless, infinite dimensions of your own greater existence, so “even now” multitudinous elements of that nonearthly identity just as eagerly explore the dimensions of earthbeing and creaturehood.

Earlier I mentioned some odd effects that might occur if you tried to take your watch or other timepiece into other levels of reality.  Now, when you try to interpret your selfhood in other kinds of existence, the same surprises or distortions or alterations can seem to occur.  When you attempt to understand your psyche, and define it in terms of time, then it seems that the idea of reincarnation makes sense.  You think, “Of course.  My psyche lives many lives physically, one after the other.  If my present experience is dictated by that in my childhood, then surely; my current life is a result of earlier ones.”  And so you try to define the psyche in terms of time, and in so doing you limit your understanding and even your experience of it.

Let us try another analogy: You are an artist in the throes of inspiration.  There is before you a canvas, and you are working in all areas of it at once.  In your terms each part of the canvas could be a time period – say, a given century.  You are trying to keep some kind of overall balance and purpose in mind, so when you make one brushstroke in any particular portion of this canvas, all the relationships within the entire area can change.  No brushstroke is ever really wiped out, however, in this mysterious canvas of our analogy, but remains, further altering all the relationships at its particular level.

These magical brushstrokes, however, are not simple representations on a flat surface, but alive, carrying within themselves all of the artist’s intent, but focused through the characteristics of each individual stroke.

If the artist paints a doorway, all of the sensed perspectives within it open, and add further dimensions of reality.  Since this is our analogy, we can stretch it as far as we like – far further than any artist could stretch his canvas.  Therefore, there is no need to limit ourselves.  The canvas itself can change size and shape as the artist works.  The people in the artist’s painting are not simple representations either – to stare back at him with forever-fixed glassy eyes, or ostentatious smiles dressed in their best Sunday clothes.  Instead, they can confront the artist and talk back.  They can turn sideways in the painting and look at their companions, observe their environment, and even look out of the dimensions of the painting itself and question the artist.

Now the psyche in our analogy is both the painting and the artist, for the artist finds that all of the elements within the painting are portions of himself.  More, as he looks about, our artist discovers that he is literally surrounded by other paintings that he is also producing.  As he looks closer, he discovers that there is a still-greater masterpiece in which he appears as an artist creating the very same paintings that he begins to recognize.

Our artist then realizes that all of the people he painted are also painting their own pictures, and moving about in their own realities in a way that even he cannot perceive.

In a flash of insight it occurs to him that he also has been painted – that there is another artist behind him from whom his own creativity springs, and he also begins to look out of the frame.

Now:  If you are confused, that is fine – for it means that already we have broken through conventional ideas.  Anything that I say following this analogy will seem comparatively simple, for by now it must appear at least that you have little hope of discovering your own greater dimensions.

Again, rather than trying to define the psyche, I will try to incite your imagination so that you can leap beyond what you have been told you are, to some kind of direct experience.  To some extent this book itself provides its own demonstration.  I call Jane Roberts “Ruburt” simply because the name designates another portion of her reality, while she identifies herself as Jane.  She writes her own books and carries on as each of you do in life’s ordinary context.  She has her own unique likes and dislikes, characteristics and abilities; her own time and space slot as each of you do.  She is one living portrait of the psyche, independent in her own context, and in the environment as given.

Now I come from another portion of reality’s picture, from another dimension of the psyche in which your existence can be observed, as you might look upon a normal painting.

In those terms, I am outside of your “frame” of reference.  My perspective cannot be contained in your own painting of reality.  I write my books, but because my primary focus is in a reality that “is larger than your own”, I cannot appear as myself fully within your reference.

So Ruburt’s subjective perspective opens up because of his desire and interest, and discloses my own.  He opens up a door in himself that leads to other levels of his being, but a being that cannot be completely expressed in your world.  That existence is mine, expressed in my experience at another level of reality, so I must write my books through Ruburt.  Doors in the psyche are different from simple openings that lead from one room to another, so my books only show a glimpse of my own existence.  You all have such psychological doors, however, that lead into dimensionally greater areas of the psyche, so to some extent or another I speak for those other aspects of yourselves that do not appear in your daily context.

Beyond what I recognize as my own existence, there are others.  To some extent I share in their experience – to a far greater extent, for example, than Ruburt shares in mine.

On some relatively few occasions, for example, Ruburt has been able to contact what he calls “Seth Two”.  That level of reality, however, is even further divorced from your own.  It represents an even greater extension of the psyche, in your terms.  There is a much closer relationship, in that I recognize my own identity as a distinct portion of Seth Two’s existence, where Ruburt feels little correspondence.  In a manner of speaking, Seth Two’s reality includes my own, yet I am aware of my contribution to “his” experience.

In the same way, each of my readers has a connection with the same level of psychic reality.  In greater terms, all of this is happening at once.  Ruburt is contributing and forming a certain portion of my experience, even as I am contributing to his.  Your identities are not something already completed.  Your most minute action, thought, and dream adds to the reality of your psyche, no matter how grand or austere the psyche may appear to you when you think of it as a hypothetical term.

… Largely, the writing of this book occurs in a “no-time, or out-of-time context”.  Physically, however, Ruburt and Joseph take many hours in its production.  They have moved to a new house.  Ruburt, as usual, is smoking as I speak.  His foot rests upon a coffee table, as he moves back and forth in his rocking chair.  It is nearing midnight as I speak.  Earlier, a great thunderstorm raged, its reverberations seeming to crack the sky.  Now it is quiet, with only the drone of Ruburt’s new refrigerator sounding like the deep purr of some mechanical animal.

As you read this book, you are also immersed in such intimate physical experiences.  Do not consider them as separated from the greater reality of your being, but as a part of it.  You do not exist outside of your psyche’s being, but within it.  Some of you may have just put children to bed as you read these lines.  Some of you may be sitting at a table.  Some of you may have just gone to the bathroom.  These mundane activities may seem quite divorced from what I am telling you, yet in each simple gesture, and in the most necessary of physical acts, there is the great magical unknowing elegance in which you reside – and in the most ordinary of your motions, there are clues and hints as to the nature of the psyche and its human expression.

Seth: The Nature of the Psyche

Session 753

As the earth is composed of many environments, so is the psyche.  As there are different continents, islands, mountains, seas, and peninsulas, so the psyche takes various shapes.  If you live in one country, you often consider natives in other areas of the world as foreigners, while of course they see you in the same light.  In those terms, the psyche contains many other levels of reality.  From your point of view these might appear alien, and yet they are as much a part of your psyche as your motherland is a portion of the earth.

Different countries follow different kinds of constitutions, and even within any geographical area there may be various local laws followed by the populace.  For example, if you are driving a car you may discover to your chagrin that the local speed limit in one small town is miles slower than in another.  In the same manner, different portions of the psyche exist with their own local “laws”, their different kinds of “government”.  They each possess their own characteristic geography.

If you are traveling around the world, you have to make frequent time adjustments.  When you travel through the psyche, you will also discover that your own time is automatically squeezed out of shape.  If for a moment you try to imagine that you were able to carry your own time with you on such a journey, all packaged neatly in a wristwatch, then you would be quite amazed at what would happen.

As you approached the boundaries of certain psychic lands, the wristwatch would run backwards.  As you entered other kingdoms of the psyche, your watch would go faster or slower.  Now, if time suddenly ran backward you would notice it.  If it ran faster or slower enough, you would also notice the differences.  If time ran backward very slowly, and according to the conditions, you might not be aware of the difference, because it would take so much “time” to get from the present moment to the one “before” it that you might be struck, instead, simply with the feeling that something was familiar, as if it had happened before.

In other lands of the psyche, however, even stranger events might occur.  The watch itself might change shape, or turn heavy as a rock, or as light as a gas, so that you could not read the time at all.  Or the hands might never move.  Different portions of the psyche are familiar with all of these mentioned occurrences – because the psyche straddles any of the local laws that you recognize as “official”, and has within itself the capacity to deal with an infinite number of reality-experiences.

Now:  Obviously your physical body has capacities that few of you use to full advantage.  But beyond this, the species itself possesses the possibilities for adaptations that allow it to exist and persist in the physical environment under drastically varying circumstances.  Hidden within the corporal biological structure there are latent specializations that would allow the species to continue, and that take into consideration any of the planetary changes that might occur for whatever reasons.

The psyche, however, while being earth-tuned in your experience, also has many other systems of reality “to contend with”.  Each psyche, then, contains within it the potentials, abilities, and powers that are possible, or capable of actualization under any conditions.

The psyche, your psyche, can record and experience time backward, forward, - or sideways through systems of alternate presents – or it can maintain its own integrity in a no-time environment.  The psyche is the creator of time complexes.  Theoretically, the most fleeting moment of your day can be prolonged endlessly.  This would not be a static elongation, however, but a vivid delving into that moment, from which all time as you think of it, past and future and all its probabilities, might emerge.

If you are reading this book, you have already become weary with official concepts.  You have already begun to sense those greater dimensions of your being.  You are ready to step aside from all conventionalized doctrines, and to some extent or another you are impatient to examine and experience the natural flowing nature that is your birthright.  That birthright has long been clothed in symbols and mythologies.

Consciousness forms symbols.  It is not the other way around.  Symbols are great exuberant playthings.  You can build with them as you can with children’s blocks.  You can learn from them, as once you piled alphabet blocks together in a stack at school.  Symbols are as natural to your minds as trees are to the earth.  There is a difference, however, between a story told to children about forests, and a real child in a real woods.  Both the story and woods are “real”.  But in your terms the child entering the real woods becomes involved in its life cycle, treads upon leaves that fell yesterday, rests beneath trees far older than his or her memory, and looks up at night to see a moon that will soon disappear.  Looking at an illustration of the woods may give a child some excellent imaginative experiences, but they will be of a different kind, and the child knows the difference.

If you mistake the symbols for the reality, however, you will program your experience, and you will insist that each forest look like the pictures in your book.  In other words, you will expect your own experiences with various portions of your psyche to be more or less the same.  You will take your local laws with you, and you will try to tell psychic time with a wristwatch.

We will have to use some of your terms, however, particularly in the beginning.  Other terms with which you are familiar, we will squeeze out of all recognition.  The reality of your own being cannot be defined by anyone but you, and then your own definition must be understood as a reference point at best.  The psychologist, the priest, the physicist, the philosopher or the guru, can explain your own psyche to you only insofar as those specialists can forget that they are specialists, and deal directly with the private psyche from which all specializations come.