Definitions – Seth

These are some definitions from Seth about important human issues:

 

• “Death”? You are as dead now, and as alive, as you will ever be.” (SS — ESP, Feb. 9, 1971.) „Now: For those of you who are lazy I can offer no hope: death will not bring you an eternal resting place. You may rest, if this is your wish, for a while. Not only must you use your abilities after death, however, but you must face up to yourself for those that you did not use during your previous existence…

• “Evil”? …evil is simply ignorance…” (SS — Session 546.) “…quite simply and in a way that you cannot presently understand, evil does not exist…” (SS — Session 568.) “While this may seem like the sheerest Pollyanna, nevertheless there is no evil in basic terms. This does not mean that you do not meet with effects that appear evil, but as you each move individually through the dimensions of your own consciousness, you will understand that all seeming opposites are other faces of the one supreme drive toward creativity. (NPR — Session 648)

• Karma and Reincarnation  “The Basic idea of karma is not punishment. Karma presents the opportunity for development; to make use of opportunities that were not taken advantage of, to fill in gasps of ignorance, to enlarge understanding through experience, to do what should be done. Free choice is always involved. The purpose is always knowledge and development, rather than punishment, self-punishment.” (ES # 8 — Session 388.) “If you realize that you create your physical reality through your own thoughts and desires, then you have learned the most important aspects of reality. This is what you have been setting out to do in your other lives, in your past existences. The realization of these truths nullifies any so-called debts from other lives. When you realize this and act upon it, there is no reason for you to come back here again unless you want to. Any of your difficulties in past lives were caused because you did not realize these basic truths. Your reincarnational pasts can help you if you know of them — *only* if they make these truths evident to you, only if you learn from them. Otherwise, they exist within you subconsciously and unconsciously in any case.” (ESP — Feb. 3, 1970)

• “Nirvana”? “The you that you consider yourself is never annihilated. Your consciousness is not snuffed out, nor is it swallowed, blissfully unaware of itself, in some nirvana. You are as much a part of a nirvana now as you will ever be.” [Footnote from Robert Butts:] *In Buddhism, nirvana — a state of heavenly perfection — is achieved by the extinction of individual life and the soul’s absorption into the supreme spirit. In a recent ESP class session, however, Seth said: “There is nothing more deadly than nirvana. At least your Christian concepts give you some twilight hopes of a stifling and boring paradise, where your individuality can at least express itself, and nirvana extends no such comfort. Instead it offers you the annihilation of your personality, in a bliss that destroys the integrity of your being. Run from such bliss!“ (NPR — Session 637)

 

•  Dreams  „Dreams are one of your greatest natural therapies and assets as connectors between the interior and exterior universes.“ (NPR — Session 640.) “Your normal consciousness can benefit by excursions and rest in those other fields of actuality that are entered when you sleep, and the so-called sleeping consciousness will also benefit by frequent excursions into the waking state.” (SS — Session 532)

• Free Will   “All personalities have free will and work out their own challenges.” (Session 586.) “Because you have free will you have the responsibility and the gift, the joy and the necessity, of working with your beliefs and of choosing your personal reality as you desire.” (Session 648.) “No purpose is forced upon any personality.” (Session 95.) “All you have to do is realize that you are free…” (ESP)

 

• Love  “It [love] is the basis for any reality that any consciousness knows. If it would not be love, then I would not be here and if it were not for love, you would not have the planet that you know… [Love is the] basis of all existence.” (ESP —April 13, 1971.)  “Love does not demand sacrifice.” ; “All other emotions are based on love, and in one way or another they all relate to it, and all are methods of returning to it and expanding its capacities.” ; “You must first love yourself before you love another.” (NPR — Session 674.) “Love is a biological necessity, a force operating to one degree or another in all biological life. Without love there is no physical commitment to life – no psychic bond.” (NP — Session 770)

• Playfulness “Worry, fear and doubt are detrimental to good health, of course, and these are very often caused by the officially held beliefs of society. Those beliefs paint a dire picture, in which any given situation is bound to deteriorate. And conceivable illness will worsen, and any possible catastrophe be encountered. Such beliefs discourage feelings of curiosity, joy, or wonder. They inhibit playful activity or spontaneous behavior. They cause a physical situation in which the body is placed in a state of defensive aggression… Play is a very important — indeed, vital — attribute in the development of growth and fulfillment. Children play naturally, and so do animals. For that matter, insects, birds, fish, and all kinds of life play. Even ants and honeybees play. Their sociability is not just a matter of constant work within a hive or an ant mound.  This playful activity is, in fact, the basis for their organized behavior, and they play at adult behavior before they assume their own duties. Creatures play because the activity is joyful, and spontaneous and beneficial, because it activates all portions of the organism — and again, in play youngsters imitate adult patterns of operation that lead finally to their own mature activity. When people become ill, worried or fearful, one of the first symptoms of trouble is a lack of pleasure, a gradual discontinuance of playful action, and an over-concentration upon personal problems.  In other words, illness is often first marked by a lack of zest or exuberance.” (TWTH — April 10, 1984.) “All of my deaths would have been adventures had I realized what I know now. On the one hand you take life too seriously, and on the other, you do not take playful existence seriously enough. We enjoy a sense of play that is highly spontaneous, and yet I suppose you would call it responsible play. Certainly it is creative play. We play, for example, with the mobility of our consciousness, seeing how ‘far’ one can send it. We are constantly surprised at the products of our own consciousness, of the dimensions of reality through which we can hopscotch.” (SS — Session 518.) “When you are utilizing your imagination in the way I have suggested, purposefully do so in a playful manner, knowing that in so-called realistic terms there may be great discrepancies between imagination and fact.” (NPR, Session 669.) “Now, there may be moments while you are juggling beliefs when you realize that one structure does not satisfy you, and you have not as yet learned to construct a new one. And so you may go about your day in your own way thinking, ‘Ohhh, woe is me.  Where can I look? These frightful beliefs imprison me and there is nowhere to go!’ But the new designs, with the new blocks, are quite there, and quite available. And if you are playful enough about it you would be quite aware, and there is no need to wait for new beliefs — unless you believe that you must wait for new beliefs. And there is no struggle… unless you believe that you must struggle. And it is not hard unless you believe that it must be difficult.” (ESP — Sep. 26, l972)

• Spontaneity  “To ‘let go’ is to trust the spontaneity of your own being, to trust your own energy and power and strength, and to abandon yourself to the energy of your own life. The word ‘abandon’ itself may strike some readers as particularly strong, but each element of nature abandons itself to the lifeform.  So does each atom of your body.  To abandon yourself, then, to the power of your own life, is to rely upon the great forces within and yet beyond nature that gave birth to the universe and to you.” (TWTH — June 10, 1984, p.268.) “Now, I tell you that in basic terms civilization is dependent upon the spontaneity and fulfillment of the individual. Your civilization is in sad straits. Not because you have allowed spontaneity or fulfillment to individuals, but because you have denied it, and because your institutions are based upon that premise. You think that, left alone, the natural inclinations of man would destroy civilization. Then what indeed started civilization if not the natural inclinations of man? What began the cooperation that allows people to unite even in tribes, if not the natural inclination of man? If you learn to trust your being, then you will be able to trust your institutions and your civilizations. You equate spontaneity with irresponsibility, abandon with evil. If you abandon yourselves to yourselves, then what good would seem to spring out of the heavens of your being! Your world is not in dire straits because you trust yourselves, but precisely because you do not. Your social structures are set up to fence in the individual, rather than to allow the natural development of the individual. Your mass wars are caused because individuals are not allowed their natural freedom, which means that civilization is denied natural ability, and good joyful work of a man and a woman, knowing where he or she belongs in work and joy that is peculiarly suited to private ability.” (ESP — May 14, 1974.)  “Trust … the spontaneity of your own being and the life that is your own. If you do not like where you are, then examine those beliefs that you have. Bring them out into the open. There is nothing within yourself to fear.” (NPR — Session 677)

• “The Ends Do Not Justify The Means.”  “It is not that you must be taught not to destroy, for destruction does not actually exist. It is that you must be trained to create responsibly…” (SM — Session 446/Seth II.) „Again, the end does not justify the means — so no amount of war is ever going to produce a meaningful peace.“ (TWTH — June 27, 1984, p. 315.) „To desire peace strongly is to help achieve it.“ (ES # 8 — Session 337.) “ ‘If I am attacked by another person, are you telling me that I cannot aggressively counter his obvious intent to destroy me?’ Not at all. You could counter such an attack in several ways that do not involve killing. You would not be in such a hypothetical situation to begin with unless violent thoughts of your own, faced or unfaced, had attracted it to you. But once it is a fact, and according to the circumstances, many methods could be used. Because you consider aggression synonymous with violence, you may not understand that aggressive — forceful, active, mental or spoken — commands for peace could save your life in such a case; yet they could.” (NPR — Session 634.) “Any time that you commit a violence, or accept violence in what you think of as the defense of good, you are doing what was done in that [Hitler’s] time, and bear that in your heart. The end does not justify the means in your reality. And when you are teaching others, hold that in your heart. It is your one and only defense against what happened in Hitler’s time, and that answer is within you. And what’s more, you know it!” (ESP — Jan. 16, 1973.) “The end does not justify the means. If you learn that lesson, then your good intent will allow you to act effectively and creatively in your private experience, and in your relationships with others. Your changed beliefs will affect the mental atmosphere of your nation and of the world.” (MassE– Session — 873)

• The Power of Suggestion  „Suggestion is no more and no less than an inner willingness and consent to allow a particular action to occur; and this consent is the trigger which sets off the subconscious mechanisms that allow you to construct inner data into physical reality.“ (SM.) “…Any physician of any kind can only help a sufferer mobilize these energies and direct them.  A sufferer has adopted an illness into his own self-image, through suggestion, which to a large degree he himself has given.  He has caused the illness, whether it be organic or otherwise, and only suggestion will rid him of it…” ;  “So-called suggestion causes not only sickness but health. The term itself is a very poor one.  We will go much more deeply into this as the whole discussion continues.  Needless to say, suggestion operates as strongly and as realistically and as practically within an atom, or a toad, or a leaf, as it does in man. . . ”;  “Also consider our material on expectation, for indeed expectation comes closer, as a term, than does suggestion. (ES #4 — Session 159, p.67-68.) “Suggestions are usually statements directed toward a particular action or hypothesis. To a large extent, suggestions are tied into conscious thought processes, following the dictates of reasons. For example: ‘If thus and thus be so, then thus and thus must follow.’ There is no magic connected with suggestions — but repeated often enough, and believed in fervently, such suggestions do indeed take on a deeply habitual nature. They are no longer examined, but taken for literal truth.“ (TWTH — April 8, 1984, pg. 168.) „Tell yourself frequently, ‚I will only react to constructive suggestions,‘ for this gives you some protection against your own negative thoughts and those of others.“ (SM — Chapter 13)

• The Self Is Not Limited  The true meaning of that statement may sometime dawn. The idea of one personhood still closes your eyes to the greater multipersonhood that is your true reality. Often your dreams give you a hint of this kind of existence.” (UR #2 — Session 729.) “If you sell yourselves short, you will say, ‘I am a physical organism and I live within the boundaries of my environment.’ If you do not sell yourselves short, you will say, ‘I am an individual. I form my physical environment. I change and make my world. I am free of space and time. I am part of All That Is. There is no place within me that creativity does not exist.’ ” (SM — Session 329)

• There Are No Divisions To The Self.  “There are no boundaries or separations of the self.” (NPR — Session 614.)  “Remember, there are no divisions, so the terms used are simply to make the discussion easier.” (NPR — Ch. 3.) “What seems subconscious in one instant may be conscious the next. An unconscious motive may also be conscious at one point. Even in these terms your experience should tell you that the words themselves make divisions that do not exist in your own experience.” (SS — Session 527.) “There are no divisions to the self. Those that you experience are illusions. Yet those illusions are lovely. They are creative. They are valid experiences of reality.” (ESP — April 9, 1974)

• Time  …Basically time is simultaneous…” (NPR — Session 654.) “There simply is no time as you think of it, only a present in which all things occur.” (NPR — Session 669.) “Space and time are both root assumptions, which simply means that man accepts both, and assumes that his reality is rooted in a series of moments and a dimension of space.” (NPR — Session 613.) “…You are learning to handle perception and experience, and time gives it to you in slow and small doses.” (ES #9 — Session 433.) “What separates events is not time, but your perception.” (SS —  Session 582.) “You and your reincarnated selves, or personalities, are not imprisoned in time. There is a constant interchange going on between what you think of as your present self, and your past and future selves.”; “You are not imprisoned in time unless you believe that you are, and there is nothing more important than belief.” (SS — ESP Jan. 5, 1971.) „While I am not affected by time on your plane I am affected by something resembling time on my plane.“ (ES #1 —  Session 14)

• Value Fulfillment   “The term ‘value fulfillment’ is very difficult to explain, but it is very important. Obviously it deals with the development of values – not moral values, however, but values for which you really have no adequate words. Quite simply, these values have to do with increasing the quality of whatever life the being feels at its center. The quality of that life is not simply to be handed down or experienced, for example, but is to be creatively added to, multiplied, in a way that has nothing to do with quantity.” (MassE — Session 863)

All quotes © Robert F. Butts