Continuing my look at Jane Roberts's 1970 book The Seth Material, today I'll cover chapters 8 through 13. This takes us about two-thirds of the way through the book.
A good part of this section deals with Jane's ESP abilities, which seem to be legitimate (if we can accept her account at face value – and I think we probably can, given the endorsements provided by some parapsychologists). What I find more interesting is the philosophical material purportedly channeled by Jane, speaking with the voice of Seth, a high-level discarnate entity.
Seth's discussion of reincarnation matches up pretty well with my own speculations on the subject. Essentially he tells us that past, present, and future are concepts that don't apply to the higher self. Accordingly, all incarnations are lived simultaneously, even though, as a matter of convenience, they can be described as past or future lives from our current perspective. He explains:
Your idea of time is false. Time as you experience it is an illusion caused by your own physical senses ... The physical senses can only perceive reality a little bit at a time, and so it seems to you that one moment exists and is gone forever, and the next moment comes and like the one before also disappears.
But everything in the universe exists at one time, simultaneously. The first words ever spoken still ring through the universe, and in your terms, the last words ever spoken have already been said, for there is no beginning. It is only your perception that is limited.
There is no past, present, and future. These only appear to those who exist within three-dimensional reality. Since I am no longer in it, I can perceive what you do not. There is also a part of you that is not imprisoned within physical reality, and that part of you knows that there is only an Eternal Now. The part of you who knows this is the whole self …
Pretend that you have several dreams, and you know that you are dreaming. Within each dream, one hundred earthly years may pass, but to you, the dreamer, no time has passed, for you are free of the dimension in which time exists. The time you seem to spend within the dream – or within each life – is only an illusion, and to the inner self no time has passed because there is no time.…
The various reincarnational selves can be superficially regarded as portions of a crossword puzzle, for they are all portions of the whole, and yet they can exist separately.…
What you have instead [of sequential time] is something like the developments narrated in The Three Faces of Eve. You have dominant egos, all a part of an inner identity, dominant in various existences. But the separate existences exist simultaneously. Only the egos involved make the time distinction. 145 BC, A.D. 145, a thousand years in your past, and a thousand years in your future – all exist now.…
It is interesting that the personalities [in Three Faces of Eve] did alternate‚ and all were in existence at once, so to speak, even though only one was dominant at any given time. In the same way, so-called past personalities are present in you now but not dominant … Since all events occur at once in actuality, there is little to be gained by saying that a past event causes a present one. Past experience does not cause present experience. You are forming past, present, and future – simultaneously. Since events appear to you in sequence, this is difficult to explain.
When it is said that certain characteristics form a past life influence or cause present patterns of behavior, such statements – and I have made some of them – are highly simplified to make certain points clear.
The whole self is aware of all of the experiences of all of its egos, and since one identity forms them, there are bound to be similarities between them and shared characteristics. The material I have given you on reincarnation is quite valid, particularly for working purposes, but it is a simplified version of what actually occurs.
Each incarnated personality represents only the tip of the iceberg of the total personality, which is the sum of all its parts. The higher self chooses when and where to be incarnated but cannot control the course of the incarnated personality's life, which is determined, in large part, by the free will choices of the earthly ego. As a result, some incarnations are more successful than others, in the sense that some people will learn the lessons they were intended to learn, while others will not. In the event that a necessary lesson is not learned, a new incarnation is necessary to get the job done.
Souls are often grouped together and reincarnate collectively, playing different roles in different lifetimes. Karma is not a form of punishment. It "presents the opportunity for development. It enables the individual to enlarge understanding through experience, to fill in gaps of ignorance, to do what should be done. Free will is always involved."
When it comes to Seth's discussions of the past lives of particular people who attended the sessions, the material is pretty standard. Happily, no past lives as celebrities are reported, although in one case a person was said to have been a priest in Atlantis. This was, however, the only reference to Atlantis that Seth came up with, which is probably just as well. (For the record, I'm dubious that there was ever a "lost continent" of Atlantis, although it's possible that the Minoan civilization on the island of Crete formed the basis of the legend, and conceivably this is what is meant by Atlantis in such accounts.)
At any rate, the reincarnation material, though impossible to prove and therefore lacking any evidential value, at least dovetails with many other sources and, for what it's worth, with my own speculations on the subject.
When we get into the nature of physical reality, however, difficulties arise. The basic idea of Seth's teaching in this area is that we are constantly forming the physical universe without knowing it. Jane Roberts, speaking for herself rather than as Seth, summarizes:
We form matter in order to operate in three-dimensional reality, develop our abilities and help others. Physical matter is like plastic that we use and mold to our own desire, not like concrete into which our consciousness has been poured. Without realizing it we project our ideas outward to form physical reality. Our bodies are the materialization of what we think we are. We are all creators, then, and this world is our joint creation …
We are not at the mercy of events. We form the events to which we then react.
How does this actually work? According to Seth, everything in the universe has some degree of consciousness, right down to atoms and even subatomic particles. "Even the lowest particle retains its individuality," he claims. He goes on:
Matter is continually created, but no particular object is in itself continuous. There is not, for example, one physical object that deteriorates with age. There are instead continuous creations of psychic energy into a physical pattern that appears to hold a more or less rigid appearance [which deteriorates as the energy behind it weakens, creating the appearance of age].…
Matter of itself … is no more continuous, no more given to growth or age that is, say, the color yellow …
Each individual creates his own space continuum …
As [one of the attendees] sits in his chair, he is constantly creating his own physical image, using his own psychic energy, and using particular atoms and molecules for the construction of his body.
During the session in which these ideas were expressed, several apparitional materialization's were reported that were, according to Seth, his attempt to dramatize the idea that physical reality can be manipulated by the mind.
In a later session, Seth goes into the mechanics of this process. This is where I think we really get into some trouble. He tells us:
Thoughts and images are formed into physical reality and become physical fact. They are propelled chemically. A thought is energy. It begins to produce itself physically at the moment of its conception.
Mental enzymes are connected with the pineal gland. As you know them, body chemicals are physical, but they are the propellants of this thought-energy, containing all the codified data necessary for translating any thought or image into physical actuality …
Chemicals are released through the skin and pore systems, in an invisible but definite pseudophysical formation. The intensity of a thought or image largely determines the immediacy of its physical materialization. There is no object about you that you have not created. There is nothing about your own physical image that you have not made.
The initial thought or image ... is not yet physical. Then it is sparked into physical materialization by the mental enzymes.
If I'm reading this correctly, we're supposed to believe that our particular physical world – which is distinct from every other observer's physical world, albeit with overlapping features – is generated by the release of "chemicals" through the pores of the skin. (And wouldn't you know that the pineal gland, a favorite of mystics and alchemists down through the centuries, would play a role?)
There are at least two problems with this notion, one empirical and one logical.
The empirical problem is that no one has ever detected the release of any such chemicals, though one would think that a release of any chemical substance sufficient to form our entire subjective environment would not go unnoticed. A related empirical problem is that it's hard to see how the human body could contain enough "chemicals" to produce its environment from moment to moment, especially if that environment consists of some massively large object like the Empire State Building.
The logical problem is that the body itself is supposed to be produced from thoughts. But if so, then the chemicals exuded by the body are themselves nothing more than thought-forms. Can thought-forms produce other thought-forms? Why would this even be necessary? If the mind can produce the chemicals of the body directly, why can it not produce all the other physical features of its environment directly, without the need to exude any chemicals – which are, after all, only illusions anyway?
I'm not necessarily opposed to the idea that each individual, as a subjective observer, creates his own bubble of reality, which overlaps with other people's bubbles. This idea has been explored in some detail by Bernardo Kastrup in his paper "Making Sense of the Mental Universe," and though I have some issues with that paper, which I may get into sometime, it's at least an interesting idea and could be true. But this whole business of exuding chemicals through the skin strikes me as silly and even self-contradictory.
The other major subject tackled by Seth in these chapters is health. Here we have the fairly standard New Age idea that we can maintain our health by thinking the right thoughts. Perhaps this was more of a novelty in 1970 than it is today – I'm not sure. In any event, I'm skeptical of such assertions. For one thing, I think they give far too much power to our thoughts, which can lead us to be afraid of our own thinking. Seth says as much at one point, when addressing a particular sitter who was plagued by poor health:
You must watch the pictures that you paint with your imagination, for you allow your imagination too full a reign. If you read our early material, you will see that your environment and the conditions of your life in any given time are the direct result of your own inner expectations. You form physical materializations of these realities within your own mind.
If you imagine dire circumstances, ill health, or desperate loneliness, these will be automatically materialized, for these thoughts themselves bring about the conditions that will give them reality in physical terms. If you would have good health, then you must imagine this as vividly as in fear you imagine the opposite.
You create your own difficulties. This is true for each individual. The inner psychological state is projected outward, gaining physical reality – and this regardless of the nature of the psychological state …
You cannot escape your own attitudes, for they will form the nature of what you see.
There is probably some truth in this. It's hard to deny that our expectations condition, to a certain extent, what we pay attention to in our environment. If we expect bad news, we focus on it. But to draw the larger conclusion that we will materialize anything that we vividly imagine seems unrealistic and unhelpful. Its practical result is to make people feel that they themselves are responsible for their own illness, not necessarily a healthy attitude.
Overall, I continue to find the Seth teachings a very mixed bag. I do think that Jane Roberts had legitimate psychic abilities and was a sincere spiritual seeker. I don't think she was just in it for the money, though undoubtedly she did quite well with her series of books on Seth. But it's one thing to say that she was channeling some kind of information that came, at least in part, from a discarnate source, and another thing to say that the claims made by this source are entirely trustworthy. There may have been errors in transmission, or maybe Seth wasn't all that he was made out to be. Who knows?
Anyway, I'll continue to the end – though I have to admit that I'm starting to find the book to be a bit of a long slog.
I think that it is a mistake to think that Seth could possibly know everything he says he does, even if he is legit as an actual entity. Maybe he knows some of these things, but is just winging it on other subjects. Kind of like your know-it-all brother-in-law of the spirit world.
I too have read some of this stuff in "Seth Speaks", which I never got completely through BTW.
Posted by: Steven Smith from ABQ | July 18, 2018 at 04:17 PM
I am trying to figure out why a discussion of Jane Roberts and the 'Seth' materials seems to bring out a visceral skeptic in me,---that's Skeptic with a capital 'S". It is as if somewhere deep inside of me I have made up my mind that I am not going to change what I think about Roberts and Seth. I don't even want to look at the Seth materials to re-evaluate them. I guess I have the 'Joe Nickell Syndrome' regarding this case. ( Nickell is the debunker to end all debunkers of CISCOP.)
I think Roberts is talking in a self-fabricated persona not a secondary personality nor is a spirit entity called 'Seth' speaking through her. However, from a review of her childhood abuse and early adult life she appears to have many classic reasons for the development of multiple personalities but I really don't think that Seth is a secondary personality of Roberts. It seems as if Roberts is consciously assuming a persona from which she can relate her own ideas about the nature of reality. Her dramatization of 'Seth' in the videos is somewhat laughable for me but I suppose that her witchy look with snaggleteeth as well as the booming voice and stilted mannerisms all contribute to the farce.
Someone has pointed out that the modern language usage of Seth is similar to the language of the area in which Roberts was raised and lived even though Seth was supposed to be from outside time or space.
At one time for some reason I was sitting in an empty grandstand of the State fairgrounds when an older man, a farmer type sat within speaking distance of me. While I was not raised on a farm and am in no way a 'cowboy'; for fun I began speaking to him with a country western drawl. The conversation did not last long. I found the encounter quite entertaining and I realized that I could have kept up this pretense for some time. I think this was what Roberts was doing. I think she was acting.
Roberts was a prolific writer prior to the 'Seth' books. Her credits are enviable and 8 or 9 books were published after her death so financially she and her second husband Robert Butts probably did very well. - AOD
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jane_Roberts
(I find it interesting that the Wikipedia editors are much kinder to Jane Roberts than they are to others involved in parapsychological or spiritual pursuits. Why is that?)
Posted by: Amos Oliver Doyle | July 18, 2018 at 09:05 PM
Yep. I recall that when I was reading the book, that bit about the chemical secretions from the pineal gland was when I stopped giving it serious consideration.
Really, the rest of the material is just a mish mash of other ideas that were popular and readily available at the time; everything from Carlos Castaneda to various fantastical stories about yogis in India (can't remember titles at the moment).
I don't know if Roberts was a pure fraud. I kind of doubt it. My theory is that some people experience true psychic ability and it is impressive enough, periodically, that they become convinced that anything that pops into their head must be real paranormal communication. Then they get carried away with having special abilities because it makes them special. The money that they may make off becoming a psy celeb further fuels their egos and delusions.
Posted by: Eric Newhill | July 19, 2018 at 12:24 PM
Interesting look again at the Seth material. Yes, I'd agree it's all quite a mixed bag.
I don't know that Jane and her husband ever really profited much from those books. Maybe they did, but reading them, I never got the impression that they did. They were living in an apartment in upstate New York and didn't have a car - this, I think, after several books had been published. Not that there's anything wrong with that, but it doesn't suggest that they made millions.
As Michael noted, there's a lot of it that simply doesn't make sense. The argument is that it doesn't make sense is that one is looking at the material from the restriction of being in time and space. OK. There is something over all weird about the material - and yet, strangely I found it oddly, very relaxing, almost comforting, to read. But I would never want to start reading it again, as I have a feeling, I'd get almost the obsession I had reading the material that I experienced a few years ago.
Posted by: Kathleen | July 19, 2018 at 07:13 PM
I can’t say how Jane and Rob spent their money, but I’m sure they made out well on these books. My used copy of "The Seth Material" is the book's 17th printing. Any book that goes through 17 printings is very profitable.
And the book, originally published in 1970, is still in print today — although the current publisher appears to be a small press, indicating a much reduced audience.
Posted by: Michael Prescott | July 19, 2018 at 09:33 PM
I found it a little bit more tolerable listening to the audio book. - AOD
https://youtu.be/gPO1E4GvZiU
Posted by: Amos Oliver Doyle | July 19, 2018 at 09:47 PM
Michael, I think you may have started with the wrong book. Most Sethies will tell you that the material really warms up once the Seth/Jane Roberts relationship matures.
The best starting point is 'Seth Speaks'.
Most Sethies will agree that while the earlier work - the Seth Material, does have some good points, there are still some issues with Jane's belief system influencing the channelled material, which may account for some of the nonsense.
Once you get to 'Seth Speaks', the material is of pretty high quality in my view, at least for a channelled source. In my opinion it's impossible to have a pure transmission, but with Seth, at least from 'Seth Speaks' onwards, the signal to noise ratio is fairly low.
Interestingly, in Seth Speaks, he fully acknowledges the signal to noise issue, and advises to always apply one's reason and intuition when interpreting the material.
Posted by: Douglas | July 20, 2018 at 08:33 AM
I'm curious, Michael: When Seth talks about reincarnation, what does he say about each individual personality? Do they ever come back to the physical world? Or do they stay in the spiritual forevermore, growing and evolving in their own way while new personalities are created?
Posted by: Ian | July 21, 2018 at 04:09 AM
He says that the various personalities are subsumed into the whole self, aka the entity — what I would call the higher self. Each personality represents a separate incarnation, so a given personality never reincarnates.
The higher self or oversoul corresponds to Eve in the movie "The Three Faces of Eve" (a fact-based story of multiple personality disorder). Each incarnated personality corresponds to one of Eve's alter egos. The goal of Eve's psychotherapy was to merge the alter egos so that all parts of Eve's consciousness would find expression in a single personality, rather than being compartmentalized.
Posted by: Michael Prescott | July 21, 2018 at 10:30 AM
It is interesting to read a comment by Mrs. Sizemore (Eve) as quoted in Wikipedia in which Mrs. Sizemore says, "Despite authorities' claims to the contrary, my former alters were not fragments of my birth personality. They were entities, whole in their own rights, who coexisted with my birth personality before I was born. They were not me, but they remain intrinsically related to what it means to be me." Apparently later in life 'Eve' displayed as many as 20 alternates.
I think it is time to reconsider the multiple personality diagnosis as psychiatric pathology and to entertain the possibility that at least some of these people are either possessed by other spirits or they are past life personalities. - AOD
Posted by: Amos Oliver Doyle | July 21, 2018 at 01:19 PM
Regarding time, I read an article about a man in a mental institution. While most patients did crafts or watched TV all day, he was content to sit wherever they put him. He seemed happy and could communicate well. Turns out he had absolutely no short term memory,and very little recall of his early life. It wasn't mentioned in the article, but it struck me that time wouldn't pass for him as us. In a way, he was always just waking up. Memory makes time? Einstein's theories also made trouble for time. It was proven in the nineteen seventies. Regarding health, skin cancer was rare in the early nineteen hundreds (they knew what it was) it is now the number two killer of white men. It started when they invented Sun screen and told us the Sun was bad for us. Everyone knows someone who loves to talk about their latest ailments. They won't run out because it's a vital part of who they are. Millions have thought or believed themselves into an early grave. I couldn't agree with Seth more on that one. Mark Twain said it best. "Disease is like fashion, everyone has to have the latest thing.
Posted by: Steve Phibrook | July 22, 2018 at 11:41 PM
Steve,
I hate to be nit picky, but we need to be careful when developing paranormal theories. Regarding skin cancer, while it has been known and documented for thousands of years, there was indeed, as you note, an increase in incidence only in recent decades. However, this increase seems totally explainable by normal means.
1) As with many comparisons of diseases progressive diseases between previous centuries and modern times, the difference in avg life span of people of the different era must be taken into consideration. Skin cancer develops over time. Typically, cancer caused by over exposure to the sun doesn't begin to show itself as tumors until decades after the exposure. So a longer avg life span means that there will be an increase in incidence simply because more people have survived to experience the development of the disease.
2) It wasn't until the 1920s that having a tan was considered fashionable and healthy. Prior to that, people, especially women, but men too, thought that being tanned made one appear to be a low class laborer. There was a social stigma against it and most people wore hats and long sleeved clothing so as to avoid being exposed to the sun. Also, sunscreen isn't new. In the 1800s women wore makeup containing lead and/or arsenic (!!!) that was thick enough to block the UV light's effects if protective clothing wasn't feasible.
I do believe that a majority of poor health outcomes are the result of negative thinking; just not in the way that Seth says. IMO, negative thinking leads to bad behaviors/habits that lead to bad health. Somewhat conversely, I have known people with really bad attitudes that have lived long and relatively healthy lives because their particular form of bad attitude did not lead to suboptimal habits where physical health is concerned.
Somewhere in between are, for example, digestive system issues that result from prolonged tendencies, like internalizing stress, anger and other strong emotions. Still, there is, ultimately, a normal explanation for the poor health outcome. Prolonged stress causes an increase in adrenalin and other hormones, which in turn have a real biochemical impact on the biological systems of the body.
Once upon a time, I found the Sethian explanation attractive. I no longer give it any credence. I now think that the power of positive thinking, to the extent that it works in beneficial ways, is primarily explained via normal psychological processes.
Posted by: Eric Newhill | July 23, 2018 at 11:09 AM
Two comments. This first:
I'm sure that all of us have learned some entirely new field at some point in our lives more recently than childhood. One of the things I consistently run into regarding this kind of expansion of knowledge is that it's impossible to hold a really good overall view until you know a good percentage of what you need to know. Up to that point, it's all disconnected facts (if you're learning something factual, worldly, worse if it's a woo topic like this) that don't support each other.
And then at some point, almost suddenly, it all makes sense. At that point I find myself going backwards, trying to rehash all of the material I've gone through, but with a new view to it all, and things I passed by not understanding do then make sense.
In that context with a topic like this there's going to be a lot that makes no sense at all, especially if you are, so to speak, dimensionally disabled. Not understanding those things means you are flawed, not the facts themselves.
Second:
I personally don't have trouble with the idea of us forming the material world. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has had opportunities come to me unexpectedly when I have been concentrated and fixed and wishing intensely for those things. I also think this is the origin of the fear that thinking too much about bad outcomes will cause them.
With plenty of experience in this direction I'm convinced of the positive results of my positive thoughts on my own environment. It's not a big leap for me to turn this into a collective effect. I don't get too wrapped up in the actual process or whether the method seems sensible to me as a rank beginner in a very complex field most of which is happening in other dimensions (see point one, above) because I can see signs of the results in my own world.
Slight confirmation of this, for me, comes from the transient nature of the 20 or 30 most basic atomic particles, all of which are reported by physicists to be flashing in and out of existence all the time. So I don't have problems with Seth's explanation of the transience of matter, nor, combining this with my own life experience, that my mental action might have something to do with this process. The leap is just all that much of a big one to make.
A lot of Madam Blavatsky's experience, if one believes it (and why not and least give it temporary, provisional credibility at this point?) would support much of this.
Posted by: Michael D | July 23, 2018 at 03:59 PM
The leap is just NOT all that much. (next to last paragraph type.)
Posted by: Michael D | July 23, 2018 at 04:08 PM
I still got the impression reading the books that they weren't living large at all, even until Jane's death in 1984, but who knows. I'd love to know what they made and spent, but that would take much research.
I also took a quick look over at Wikipedia, and again saw another instance of severe child abuse: when Jane was a child, it became her duty to take care of her bedridden mother (the father had left), with duties a minor shouldn't have been responsible for. Also from Wikipedia: "Her embittered mother used to tell Jane that she was going to turn on the gas jets in the middle of the night and kill them both." Was Seth the manifestation of a multiple personality created out of childhood trauma?
Posted by: Kathleen | July 23, 2018 at 08:19 PM
Eric,
I agree 100%. - AOD
Posted by: Amos Oliver Doyle | July 24, 2018 at 01:27 PM
Michael D, "I personally don't have trouble with the idea of us forming the material world. I'm sure I'm not the only one who has had opportunities come to me unexpectedly when I have been concentrated and fixed and wishing intensely for those things."
Regarding the latter portion of the quote, I still that is mostly due to normal psychological processes. Perhaps some small amount is, indeed, more magical.
I think that we ultimately do form the physical world, but it is at some collective energetic level well beyond our individual personalities. Matter = energy at a low vibration. Low vibrational thoughts and feelings create matter and we - or at least a portion of our awareness - ends up focused on the world of matter. This is only slightly different than how we create worlds in our dreams each night.
IMO, perception is based on a lock/key relationship between ourselves as perceptual entities and the energies at large in the sea of infinity. The energies at large are the result of...? Who knows? God?... This truly is the magic of existence and perception.
However, Seth says that we are creating the physical world via chemical secreted from the pineal gland. That is just stupid, IMO, exactly for the reasons Michael has stated.
Posted by: Eric Newhill | July 24, 2018 at 02:51 PM
I think Seth says what the universe is like. I must say, lately I have met my guide and he talks to me daily. He is an Englishman and died in the year 2000, he also had a previous life in the 1800s. What I have realised is that so many spirits want to talk to me, and they say its because they can't stand being in their head all the time. Especially the younger ones who lived life externally. Lyn x.
Posted by: Lynn | July 27, 2018 at 04:25 AM
Great posts on Seth, Michael.
Yes, the Seth material seems like a mixed bag. The stuff about creating matter via chemicals leaving the body is--sorry to be uncharitable--beyond stupid.
The material, however, can reach what seems to me to be a very high level. I heard one recording of Seth that I found quite inspirational, the one where he says, "You are not spiritually slumming."
On the whole, in terms of its spiritual and moral message, the material seems to be on the right track.
It is almost as if we are never allowed to have a text or set of texts that is 100% correct or a person who is 100% heroic. There are things that Jesus says in the New Testament as well that seem out of character (or at least as people tend to imagine him... an image that is somewhat difficult to form in the first place).
Posted by: Matt Rouge | July 28, 2018 at 01:06 PM
I remain just as mystified about Seth as probably anyone else, but I found it interesting that the pineal gland has been reputed to have some spiritual significance. It has been called the "third eye" and it's function appears to regulate sleep and wakefulness.
Matt, I'd be interested in hearing what you think was out-of-character for Jesus. I've come to see much of what he said (hopefully rightly) as the result of putting things in a way for his mostly agricultural, not highly-educated audience in terms that they could most easily understand. I was also interested to learn recently that he mentions hell more than I had previously thought.
Posted by: Kathleen | July 29, 2018 at 08:06 PM
Kathleen wrote,
||[...] I found it interesting that the pineal gland has been reputed to have some spiritual significance. It has been called the "third eye" and it's function appears to regulate sleep and wakefulness.||
That's not a Seth original observation or suggestion, however.
||Matt, I'd be interested in hearing what you think was out-of-character for Jesus. I've come to see much of what he said (hopefully rightly) as the result of putting things in a way for his mostly agricultural, not highly-educated audience in terms that they could most easily understand.||
New Agers like myself like Jesus. I personally think the parable of the Good Samaritan is a perfect and expression of ethics, never to be bettered. We think of Jesus as preaching love and forgiveness, which he did. But then you have things like the parable of the weeds. Matthew 13:
<40 “As the weeds are pulled up and burned in the fire, so it will be at the end of the age. 41 The Son of Man will send out his angels, and they will weed out of his kingdom everything that causes sin and all who do evil. 42 They will throw them into the blazing furnace, where there will be weeping and gnashing of teeth. 43 Then the righteous will shine like the sun in the kingdom of their Father. Whoever has ears, let them hear.>
OTOH, New Agers don't buy this kind of crap. Do I think it fits the loving and forgiving side of Jesus, the one who told us to pray for those who do evil to us, etc.? Absolutely not. When Jesus is speaking as he is above, he sounds like a rageful cult leader, not the one who preached the Good News.
Maybe he was both. It would be nice to listen to actual recordings. :)
||I was also interested to learn recently that he mentions hell more than I had previously thought.||
Yes, but what complicates that is that the whole concept of the Afterlife was really shifting in the Jewish world at the time. The whole Christian notion of heaven and hell arose seemingly quickly and more or less de novo, as both the Jews and the Romans had what would seem to us very sketchy and vague conceptions of the Afterlife.
Posted by: Matt Rouge | July 30, 2018 at 03:22 PM
Kathleen,
I don't take the Bible literally so I don't believe that I know what words Jesus actually said during his life on earth. Anything that is in the "Bible" is hearsay information passed down through many human minds and by way of many translations from one language to another, and from one translation to another translation over a period of 2018 years until we now have a 'modernized' version trying to appeal to hip teenagers. It is very trusting to expect that what is printed in the varying versions of the Bible is anything close to what Jesus may have actually said.
I do believe that someone named Jesus (English translation) actually existed and that he was specially gifted and anointed to preach the kingdom of God and to bring it to earth. But Jesus was a man of his times and knew not to throw pearls before swine, that is to say he had to express very etheric concepts in terms that simple fishermen, merchants and sheep herders could understand. It was appropriate that he would take this approach.
I think that in simple terms his teaching was to "love and forgive one another as our father God who is in heaven loves and forgives us." He preached the Golden Rule to "do unto others as you would have them do unto you---to metaphorically turn your other cheek if someone strikes you on one cheek and to offer him your coat if he asks for your shirt and if someone forces you to go one mile, go with him two."
These commands are things which we all have great trouble following.
I believe that God, as a loving God in his omniscience would not ask of us anything that he would not ask of himself and that God being perfect would offer those things to us and that any 'hell' to be experienced by a disembodied spirit on its way back to Source would be of its own making, not God's. - AOD
Posted by: Amos Oliver Doyle | July 30, 2018 at 06:39 PM
Seth claims that there were three incarnated personalities whose messages got mixed together into the Jesus story. One was John the Baptiser, one was Jesus, and the third was an unnamed individual (Paul?).
Though this assertion has no evidential value, it’s not the craziest idea I’ve heard. There are extreme contradictions in the teachings (and actions) attributed to Jesus, making it possible to see him as a highly spiritual man of peace or as a rabidly nationalistic would-be overthrower of Roman occupation. His followers seem to have regarded him in his lifetime as a messiah in the generally accepted sense — a human being entrusted by God with the task of restoring the Davidic kingdom. Later Christians, of course, saw him as a deity who came to save all mankind. The Biblical accounts blend these two incompatible characters together in a most perplexing way.
I’m not saying there really were two or three men who came to be conflated as a single character, but if there were, the inconsistencies would make more sense.
Posted by: Michael Prescott | July 30, 2018 at 11:40 PM
AOD,
I agree with all that you say, basically, but this:
"Anything that is in the "Bible" is hearsay information passed down through many human minds||
Right, we don't have the original video and audio or even transcripts. People tend to forget this and will hold debates on tiny scraps of text that don't necessarily make a lot of sense in every case (e.g., what did Jesus really believe about divorce? No one agrees.).
||and by way of many translations from one language to another, and from one translation to another translation over a period of 2018 years until we now have a 'modernized' version trying to appeal to hip teenagers."||
Well, we do have the original Greek texts of the New Testament with lots of scholarship to back up their meaning (i.e., the meaning of the words themselves and their context). There are a lot of issues here we can talk about (e.g., what texts were actually selected as Gospels, etc.) but corrupted texts isn't really one of them.
Posted by: Matt Rouge | July 31, 2018 at 12:04 AM
Michael described one 'possible' Jesus as a "rabidly nationalistic would-be overthrower of Roman occupation." Those are pretty strong descriptives and I seem to have missed that part in the Bible.
I have read that Jesus is reported to have said to "render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and to God the things that are God's which to me doesn't seem like a person who incites people to overthrow the Roman rulers. Jesus is reported to have gotten angry at times, especially at the Temple when he violently chastised the money changers and those who sold gauds and trinkets on the temple steps . He also criticized the high priests of the temple for taking a cut of the profits of the merchants on the Temple steps but such criticism was of Jews, not Romans.
Many opinions have been written I suppose about whether Jesus was political or not. Those of modern day seem to see in the accounts of Jesus political metaphors at every verse. But there are some who think that any politics related to Jesus was a view of those who wrote what are now called the 'gospels', e.g., Matthew, Mark, Luke and John, not necessarily Jesus. And, apparently some of the followers of Jesus were "zealots" who wished to overthrow Roman rule. Jesus reportedly said that his kingdom was not of this world and apparently remained apolitical in his preaching.
I acknowledge that I am not a Biblical scholar nor a historian so perhaps I could be enlightened about what is actually written about Jesus' actions to overthrow the Roman occupation. - AOD
Posted by: Amos Oliver Doyle | July 31, 2018 at 11:04 AM
Matt, regarding the passage you quote, I don't actually find that out of keeping with Jesus' message - but it's not one of his most popular teachings for obvious reasons. I think it's a myth that Jesus was all love-and-forgiveness. I think it's more accurate to state he had love and forgiveness for those who sincerely repented their sins. Personally, I do not have a problem with truly evil people who've been given every chance to repent and refuse to do so going to the bad place. I listened to an interesting NDE recently in which the person said he was given a look at hell, and was told by Jesus personally that he could not allow him to enter Heaven because sin could not be allowed to enter Heaven. And logically, how would Heaven be Heaven if it was populated by very evil people - serial killers, those who've committed genocide, etc. For those in the gray area - probably most people who not committed to evil - I would think there would be a certain purification - Catholics would call that Purgatory.
Anthony Borgia's "Life in the World Unseen" had a very interesting take on this - truly evil people were sent to a certain circle and other more advanced spirits routinely tried to enlighten them. Redemption was always available to them if they would but take it.
Michael, yes, Jane Roberts' had some interesting ideas about Jesus. She was Catholic and at one time I believe almost entered orders.
Time to stop - I'm becoming doctrinal I fear. Interesting thoughts everyone.
Posted by: Kathleen | July 31, 2018 at 08:24 PM
Amos, I talked a little about Jesus as a political revolutionary here:
http://michaelprescott.typepad.com/michael_prescotts_blog/2017/08/jesus-as-man-and-myth.html
Posted by: Michael Prescott | August 01, 2018 at 01:47 PM
I’d add that if Jesus was actually hailed as the messiah, then at the very least he was expected to overthrow Rome and restore the Davidic kingdom, since this was the role of the messiah.
The idea of a crucified messiah was seen as a contradiction in terms by most Jews — if the Romans crucified him, then he failed, so he must have been only a pretender. This is why the Jesus movement didn’t gain much traction among Jews after his death.
A messiah whose mission was to redeem the world's sins would have been an incomprehensible concept to most Jews of this period. A messiah who served as a human sacrifice would have been entirely antithetical to Jewish beliefs. A human being who was God incarnate would have seemed shockingly blasphemous. All these ideas are better suited to Greco-Roman religious thinking and took root in gentile communities.
My guess is that Jesus was a standard would-be messiah (there were others) who intended to overthrow Rome and then occupy the throne of David with his twelve apostles as his cabinet (as he promises them). Whether he planned to accomplish this revolution by military force, a divine miracle, or both is unclear. Many strands of his story point to this interpretation — see the link in my previous comment.
At the same time, other strands point to a gentle, pacifist, nonjudgmental ethos. Perhaps these were a later overlay intended to make the movement less of a threat to Roman authorities and hence minimize official persecution. Perhaps these elements are part of some other person's story that somehow got entangled or conflated with Jesus' story. Both things could be true. Who knows?
Posted by: Michael Prescott | August 01, 2018 at 02:05 PM
Well Kathleen,
I recall that Jesus reportedly said that, "He who is without sin amongst you, let him throw the first stone." So apparently Jesus thought that all have sinned, therefore no one would be allowed into heaven if it were not for forgiveness. And I seem to recall that Jesus reportedly also said to forgive "seventy times seven."
I think that that is where reincarnation comes in. Sinners will have seventy times seven times (more or less) to repent of their sins---until they eventually "see the light."
Posted by: Amos Oliver Doyle | August 01, 2018 at 05:52 PM
Kathleen,
Apparently Jesus had great love and forgiveness for the thief and murder who was crucified on a cross next to him as he reportedly said, "Today you shall be with me in paradise." - AOD
Posted by: Amos Oliver Doyle | August 01, 2018 at 06:00 PM
Michael,
Yes I remember now that post of August 2017. It was one of your many extraordinary posts and the discussion that followed it was very enlightening. - AOD
Posted by: Amos Oliver Doyle | August 01, 2018 at 09:53 PM
AOD, I am certain Jesus required repentance before forgiveness could be given. I don't see how a Heaven could actually work if people like Hitler could just show up without having first doing some major work on themselves. I've found that much of what Jesus said is actually pretty straightforward and sensible. I don't proclaim to know whether Heaven is real or not, but I do find the doctrine - I guess? - of repentance and forgiveness makes sense.
The other alternative is dualism, that is, that we have an ego and a soul. The ego dies with death, but the soul lives on, as in Buddhism. I've also thought this could possibly be the case. The souls of the Hitlers of the world might possibly experience anguish after physical death, looking back upon the evil their egos did in the physical world, an anguish that might feel Hellish.
Also, Michael, I remember that post of yours and also found it very interesting.
Posted by: Kathleen | August 08, 2018 at 07:23 PM
Kathleen,
Let's see now if I could imagine what an afterlife for Hitler might be like.
Well, first of all it would have been Hitler's consciousness that survived, his personality/ego taking its place as a facet of the 'diamond' of his oversoul. His consciousness would have entered into a 'heaven' of its own creation. A consciousness without caring, love, and concern for others: without light and without a recognition of a higher power would have doomed 'Hitler' to an association with other consciousnesses of like interests in an outer darkness where there would be "weeping and gnashing of teeth."
Could Hitler be forgiven? It might take more than just repentance and forgiveness to redeem the 'Hitler' consciousness, requiring a return to many lifetimes before it would have learned by experiencing the fear, horror, anguish and pain he inflicted upon others. It may be that it will require 70 times 7 reincarnations before the 'Hitler' consciousness will have achieved enlightenment, purification and eventually---forgiveness. - AOD
Posted by: Amos Oliver Doyle | August 09, 2018 at 08:44 PM
Our environment and physical bodies, the hardwiring of our brain, the life we have lived that "turn us into" the person we turn out to be. Our souls all start out the same but we are molded by the environment we grow up in and the chemistry (DNA, genes, etc.) of our bodies.
We don't have flawed souls. Our souls are perfect. Once our body dies, the soul transitions to that great holographic connectedness and oneness that we call heaven. It enters a place of intense "Light", has a life review, and experiences and feels, by becoming the other person, of everyone it has ever interacted with. This "life review" is not punishment - it is a learning experience and a healing process - that molds the soul into something more perfect.
We will ALL go through a life review and we will all be healed. The alcoholic stepmother that I hated so much growing up? I will know what it was to be her and what turned into the person she became; and this "being her" will allow me to realize why she was the person she was.
This Earth life is a school and the lessons we are supposed to learn are embedded in our everyday lives. We don't have to go looking for duality and separation, it will find us all on our own. This is what it means to learn holistically. In the same way a baby duck imprints on it's mother our soul is imprinted with the things it came here to learn, what it means and how it feels to be separate - which can't be learned in heaven due to those overwhelming feelings of oneness and connectedness that so many near death experiencers describe, what time and space look and feel like (because many NDEers also say that time and space don't seem to exist in heaven in the same way they do here), what it was like to have a body and the parameters of that body and how to control the body, and make memories of what it was like to live in a 3 dimensional + 1 time Universe.
So Adolph Hitler and his henchmen will be healed just like I am healed and you will be healed. We are all healed when we make contact with that light and you won't be angry or mad that Adolph and his gang weren't punished. You will be too immersed in your own journey to worry about whether someone else is being properly punished or not.
Excerpt from Mark H's NDE description:
"There is no distance here. So time does not exist." https://www.nderf.org/Experiences/1mark_h_nde.html
Posted by: Art | August 10, 2018 at 03:38 PM
I've posted my critique of Seth long time ago under different pseudonym. Unlike your dissection of Seth's particulars, I tried to grasp it as a whole.
"Seth Speaks" is by now something of an oddity- a cult book for its sparse followers (now, they'll probably protest) & virtually a nonentity for newer New Agers- after all, they got diluted and digested Seth in Walsh's "Conversations with God" (with few Sethian virtues & vices galore). So, since I'm not a "reality-creator/creationist" -what's the point in writing a review on this book ? Well....something personal ? I guess as a tribute to the most rewarding modern vision of Reality.
I've read "Seth Speaks" after having digested much more "esoteric" stuff (Evans Wentz's Tibetan Canon, theosophists, Gurdjieff, Max Heindel, Cayce, Kashmir Shaivism, Kabbalah both Hebrew and Hermetic....). In essence- Seth's is a Tantric vision of Reality as energy/consciousness Multiverse, with souls (without nitpicking, something akin to Scientology's thetan, jivatman in Shivaloka or Antarloka whizzing to Bhuloka-a Kashmir Shaivism's central narrative, Ruh of gnostic variant of Sufism or Anthropos of Hermeticism and our Western Christianity, where it played seek & hide under various guises ( Gemueth, Pneuma "married" to Psyche, Angel Christ of Valentinians,..)) creating & discreating, evolving, teaching, and- this is the royal message, at least for me: instensely living. What struck me as new in this book was primarily language and, as it were, shifting angle of exposition: at one moment Seth insists that you *are* the soul (hence, a sort of Gnosis); next page, you are instructed to contact the soul (which, by the way, passes though a bewildering variety of linguistic impersonations: inner self, Identity, whole self, Self, ....-sometimes these terms hint at other possible levels of selfhood)- hence, a sort of "contact your Higher Self" admonition in the Jungian vein. Probably the best pages (and most provoking ) are those describing systems of probable realities, mutability of selfhood in Multiverse, human incarnation, use of dreams and concept of God & perpetual creation (though, one can find the latter notion in Sufism). On balance-life affirming, "positive" and modern approach expressed through sometimes overly verbose, but nonetheless mesmerizing narrative on the Cosmos, Self and everything. If Faulkner is the preeminent example of "Dixie Gongorism", "Seth Speaks" is the most entrancing representative of "Esoteric Gongorism".
One message, almost invariably picked up as the crux of book, is that "you create your own reality". Taken literally- for anyone save Sethian fundamentalists, this is nonsense. On the other hand - this is a sound advice, when interpreted either in down-to-earth sense ("positive attitude") or in the case (extremely rare) when one is able to refocus their center of consciousness into inner self and induce a network of "synchronicities" (even then, the level of operating freedom is embedded into the greater whole where determinism and free will interplay). Egoic consciousness (or, in Seth's lingo, ego personality, conscious personality) can create and discreate, but, evidently, to a very limited degree (Freudian psychoanalysis is still valuable, at least partially, re this matter).
Be as it may, I dedicate this review as a tribute to ole Seth, the most eloquent, original, humorous, humane, muddle-headed, inspiring and exasperating "prophet" of the now extinct "Old New Age"- the only channelling that still provokes a thrill of expectation.
Historically, Seth (or Jane)seems to have absorbed many New Thought ideas from 1870ies & earlier and its connection with Christian science 6 various other cultists. However you interpret Seth, evidently he is an American; his world-view is not tragic nor sublimely religious; actually, depth & spiritual earthquake is find in true gnosis (read Henry Corbin, Mircea Eliade, Garth Fowden, Moshe Idel, E.R.Dodds, Erich Neumann, Hans Jonas, ..) leave Seth missing; finally- Seth always speaks of creativity but we don't see where this creativity actually lies, which are its fruits & how it supersedes opur notion of that activity. For a more cogent & clear exposition of spiritual psychology I'd recommend Roberto Assagioli's "Psychosynthesis" & "The Act of Will".
Posted by: Bardon Kaldian | January 20, 2019 at 06:48 PM
The Seth material is intriguing, I enjoy doing some of the exercises during my meditations,
our 3-dimensional experiences find it hard to grasp the non-existence of time, but it seems that our perception of time is necessary for us to get the jobs done during our incarnations,
sometimes I think that Seth is so far past us by leading us to believe that karma is not necessary and that cause and effect are also not necessary,
these are dangerous ideas to a 3-dimensional person and seem to be repugnant to Seth,
it seems to be enough to believe in reincarnation at this point, but I still ponder Seth's other ideas.
Posted by: Lance | June 27, 2020 at 07:29 PM