The Nature of Personal Reality

Happy New Years to my friends. I have to apologize to my friend John Ratcliff. You see, I worked long and hard (over twenty five years shooting my mouth off in cyberspace) to make sure that I am the number one search result for my name. The thing is..I am hardly the only John Ratcliff in the world. One of my namesakes (not surprisingly from the UK) sent me an email this weekend letting me know that he reads this blog and forwarded me a link to his own. This John Ratcliff is a music promoter and you can find his website here.

As I sit here on New Years Eve, drinking my first glass of Domaine Chandon 'Riche', I find myself in a contemplative mood.

I had this entire past week off of work. In fact, technically speaking, I was unemployed or 'between jobs' as they say. My new job starts on Tuesday so my stint in the unemployment line was quite brief to say the least.

Unfortunately, rather than using my time off of work to rest, refresh, and reflect, I instead spent the whole week working. You can see the fruits of my labors on my coding website here.

I did take yesterday and today off of work and I will probably just nurse a hang-over tomorrow. We have no great plans for New Years Eve. We have, year in and year out, been generally so disappointed spending a lot of money to go out that now we just prefer to stay closer to home. My son Alex likes to invite a bunch of his friends to the house to overdose on video games; in fact right now they have a Playstation 2, Xbox-360, and Nintendo Wii all fired up and numerous older systems in reserve. They are drinking Vault soda, eating pizza and snarfing candy. At midnight they will drink sparkling grape juice and run around the front yard without their shirts on. It sounds like a tradition to me....

Yesterday and today my project has been to get our old video tapes transferred into digital form. I tried using my Archos to capture the video but that didn't quite work. The signal coming out of the camcorder was too noisy and the Archos couldn't grab a stable feed. Finally I realized I could just record the videos onto my Tivo and then copy the Tivo files over the wireless to my machine. I won't bore you with the unpleasant details of file format incompatibility, network snarls, and other snafus that made this is a less than satisfying project. Finally, I found out a clean solution. Rather than copying the Tivo files over the wireless painstakingly I just using my Archos 604 to real-time encode the data as MPEG4. Apparently the Tivo was a lot more forgiving with the noisy input signal and, since the Archos was snarfing the clean output from the Tivo, it all worked out great. I will have to make a few short video segments at some point and upload them to share.

My wife's project this weekend has been finishing my Christmas present. I have always thought those outfits that Indian men wear look really sharp. I found out that it is called a 'Kurta'. Here is a photograph of one that is quite similar to what my wife is making for me. As you can see, it looks very sharp on this dapper young man. Since I haven't looked like that myself in 15 years, I don't think it will be quite so sharp on me. Tomorrow I have to buy some nice slippers to go with it. My wife plans to have it finished by then and hopefully I can wear it to my first day of work at my new job.



This afternoon I wanted to do 'something' but I wasn't quite sure what. So, I picked up one of my books and started reading. I didn't get very far at all before I decided I wanted to share it with the blog. Once again, I went back into computer mode and figured out how to use my OCR software to scan in a few excerpts that I hope to share.

I have spoken on and off about 'Seth' on this blog as well as on various religious discussion forums. I have also brought Seth up to my friend John Miles when we are out at dinner getting philisophological.

The problem with Seth is that there is no easy way to explain it. I usually keep it simple and say 'It speaks to me' and try to leave it at that. Different people are inspired by different sources. I am always surprised, and thoroughly pleased, when I read some ancient religious document or philosophical treatise and find that it exactly matches something in my own ideology. I especially enjoy this when it comes from the Vedas since they are the oldest religious documents in the world. It reminds me that none of this stuff is 'really new'; we just keep rediscovering it generation to generation within the context of our own culture.

Many people know me as a rational and scientific minded individual; which I am. So, how do you explain an attraction to material written by a ghost? (I always refer to Seth as a ghost since, technically, that is what he is.)

The reason I am attracted to the writings of this ghost is because the material is often presented using scientific terminology and is deeply logical and rational. That said, sometimes you have to slog through a lot of verbiage to get at the 'good stuff'.

Seth has no problem saying what he has to say. The ghost is responsible for thousands upon thousands of pages of material. To add to this, the man who transcribed this material (Robert Butts) felt is necessary to annotate every single paragraph with every niggling detail. When I pulled together the excerpt I am about to post I removed all of that extraneous material and I was pleased to see how much smoother it reads.

Few people can sit down and read a Seth book beginning to end. It is a difficult task. You read it in bits and pieces, a chapter at a time. That is why I can say I have never actually read an entire Seth book. I have, however, read a lot of material. The most recent book I am reading, bit by bit, is titled 'The Nature of Personal Reality : Specific Practical Techniques For Solving Everyday Problems and Enriching the Life You Know'.

I can't speak for the entire book, since I haven't read it. However, the first few chapters speak with great clarity.

It is true that much of the Seth material is in close correlation with recent discoveries and philosophical observations made about modern physics. Especially as it relates to Bohms view of the implicate and explicate order, the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, and even the multi-dimensional nature of reality as hinted at by superstring theory.

Fortunately the following excerpt doesn't touch on any of that. Instead it is pure philosophy that could have been lifted out of any book by Robert Anton Wilson. For those of you who are fans of RAW you will find this material extremely familiar but coming from a distinctly unique voice.

I should offer a brief explanation of where this material comes from. This lady, named Jane Roberts, started 'channeling' in trance some material in the late 1960's. This personality referred to itself as 'Seth' and throughout the 1970's produced an unbelievable amount of written material that comprised many books. She always maintained she was an agnostic as to whether the material truly came from a ghost named Seth, was a product of her subconscious, or a mixture of both.

The problem for me is that she is hardly the only person to have channeled religious gibberish in a trance state. Such material has a long history, including Edger Cayce, the Book of Urantia (which I wrote about before), sections of the Bible (The Book of Revelations) and, of course, zillions of New Age bubble heads who hopped on the channeling wagon once Jane Roberts made it popular.

I am a wide read individual and I find the vast majority of all channeled material to be the highest order of nonsense and tripe. I have always tried to maintain an open mind on these matters, but I have never, and I mean never, found any source material that spoke to me the way the Seth material does.

As they say, each to his own. The reason for this post is that in this book I found a portion of one chapter that I think anyone would find interesting to read. As I said, for followers of Robert Anton Wilson, you will find a great deal in it that is familiar as the Ghost touches on all of the same topics of reality assimilation.

The reason I really want to post it here is because I believe it eloquently expresses the key principle of the Seth philosophy that is distinct from so many others.

While you can find much that is inspirational in Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Gnostic Christianity, they all fall short in important ways; in ways that I think Seth eloquently expresses.

What Seth tries to communicate so clearly is HOW BLESSED WE ARE TO HAVE MATERIAL EXISTANCE!

So many Judeo-Christian ideologies view material existence as 'unclean', as 'punishment' and even the more enlightened Eastern philosophies promote a view that the goal is to 'disengage ourselves from the flesh' or Maya of the world.

Seth embraces physical existence as a great gift that we are each given; that it is a great privilege, one that is to be reveled in with the greatest creative spirit.

My point in posting this excerpt is not to convince anyone of a 'truth' or not. It is merely to demonstrate that, wherever this material came from, it at least has a message to convey. Note: Everything that follows is 100% from Seth/Jane Roberts. All parenthetic from Seth, the one footnote is by Robert Butts.

Excerpt from “The Nature of Personal Reality” by Seth/Jane Roberts, Chapter 2 : Reality and Personal Beliefs. Reprint permission granted by the spirit realm.

You form the fabric of your experience through your own beliefs and expectations. These personal ideas about yourself and the nature of reality will affect your thoughts and emotions. You take your beliefs about reality as truth, and often do not question them. They seem self-explanatory. They appear in your mind as statements of fact, far too obvious for examination.

Therefore they are accepted without question too often. They are not recognized as beliefs about reality, but are instead considered characteristics of reality itself. Frequently such ideas appear indisputable, so a part of you that it does not occur to you to speculate about their validity. They become invisible assumptions, but they nevertheless color and form your personal experience.

Some people, for example, do not question their religious beliefs but accept them as fact. Others find it comparatively easy to recognize such inner assumptions when they appear in a religious context, but are quite blind to them in other areas.

It is far simpler to recognize your own beliefs in regard to religion, politics or similar subjects, than it is to pinpoint your deepest beliefs about yourself and who and what you are - particularly in relationship with your own life.

Many individuals are completely blind to their own beliefs about themselves, and the nature of reality. Your own conscious thoughts will give you excellent clues. Often you will find yourself refusing to accept certain thoughts that come to your mind because they conflict with other usually accepted ideas.

Your conscious mind is always trying to give you a clear picture, but you often allow preconceived ideas to block out this intelligence. It has been fashionable to blame the subconscious for personality problems and difficulties, the idea being that early events, charged and mysterious, lodged there. In this country several generations grew up believing that the subconscious portions of the personality were unreliable, filled with negative energy, and contained only locked-up unpleasant episodes best forgotten.

They grew up believing that the conscious mind was relatively powerless, that adult experience was set in the days of infancy. These concepts themselves set up artificial divisions. People learned that they should not be aware of "subconscious" material.

The doors to the inner self were to be shut tight. Only lengthy psychoanalysis could or should open them. The normal individual felt that he had best leave such areas alone, so in cutting off these portions of the self, barriers were also set up against the joy of the inner spontaneous self. People felt divorced from the core of their own reality.

The concept of original sin was a very poor, limited and distorted one, but at least along with it went rather simple procedures: Through baptism you might be saved, or through certain words or sacraments or rituals redemption could be found. (See the Gospel according to Mark, 1:1-11, for instance.)

The idea of the tainted subconscious, however, left man no such relatively easy way out. The few rituals possible required years of analysis, which only the very wealthy were privileged to experience.

About the same time that the idea of the unsavory subconscious arose so strongly, the idea of the soul went out the window. Millions of people therefore believed in a reality in which they were deprived of the idea of a soul, and burdened by the concept of a very unreliable, if not definitely evil, subconscious. They saw themselves as vulnerable solitary points of egos, riding perilously and unprotected upon the tumultuous waves of involuntary processes.

At about the same time many intelligent persons were realizing that organized religions' ideas of God, and of heaven and hell, were distorted, unjust, and smacked of children's fairy tales. For these indi¬viduals there was no place to look for help.

Under the circumstances, to look within would have seemed foolhardy, for they had been taught that this within contained the source of their problems to begin with. Those who could not afford therapy tried the harder to inhibit any messages from the inner self, for fear they would become swallowed by the savage infantile emotions.

Now first of all, there are no limitations or divisions to the self, though for purposes of discussion a word like "ego" may be used here because you understand what you think it means. You can indeed depend upon seemingly unconscious portions of yourself. As you will see later, you can become more and more consciously aware, therefore bringing into your consciousness larger and larger portions of yourself.

You breathe, grow, and perform multitudinous delicate and precise activities constantly, without being consciously aware of how you carry out such manipulations. You live without consciously knowing how you maintain this miracle of physical awareness in the world of flesh and time.

The seemingly unconscious portions of yourself draw atoms and molecules from the air to form your image. Your lips move, your tongue peaks your name. Does the name belong to the atoms and molecules within your lips or tongue? The atoms and molecules move constantly, forming into cells, tissues and organs. How can the name the tongue speaks belong to them?

They do not read or write, yet they speak complicated syllables that; communicate to other beings such as yourself anything from a simple feeling to the most complicated information. How do they do this?

The atoms and molecules of the tongue do not know the syntax of the language they speak. When you begin a sentence you do not have the slightest conscious idea, often, of how you will finish it, yet you take it on faith that the words will make sense, and your meaning will flow out effortlessly.

All of this happens because the inner portions of your being operate spontaneously, joyfully, freely; all of this occurs because your inner self believes in you, often even while you do not believe in it. These unconscious portions of your being operate amazingly well, frequently despite the greatest misunderstanding on your part of their nature and function, and in the face of strong interference from you because of your beliefs.

Each person experiences a unique reality, different from any other individuals. This reality springs outward from the inner landscape of thoughts, feelings, expectations and beliefs. If you believe that the inner self works against you rather than for you, then you hamper it’s func¬tioning - or rather, you force it to behave in a certain way because of your beliefs.

The conscious mind is meant to make clear judgments about your position in physical reality. Often false beliefs will prevent it from making these, for the egotistically held ideas will cloud its clear vision.

Your beliefs can be like fences that surround you.

You must first recognize the existence of such barriers - you must see them or you will not even realize that you are not free, simply because you will not see beyond the fences. They will represent the boundaries of your experience.

There is one belief, however, that destroys artificial barriers to per¬ception, an expanding belief that automatically pierces false and inhibiting ideas.

I told you that the self was not limited, yet surely you think that your self stops where your skin meets space, that you are inside your skin. Yet your environment is an extension of yourself. It is the body of your experience, coalesced in physical form. The inner self forms the objects that you know as surely and automatically as it forms your finger or your eye.

Your environment is the physical picture of your thoughts, emotions and beliefs made visible. Since your thoughts, emotions and beliefs move through space and time, you therefore affect physical conditions separate from you.

Consider the spectacular framework of your body just from the physical standpoint. You perceive it as solid, as you perceive all other physical matter; yet the more matter is explored the more obvious it becomes that within it energy takes on specific shape (in the form of organs, cells, molecules, atoms, electrons), each less physical than the last, each combining in mysterious gestalt to form matter.

The atoms within your body spin. There is constant commotion and activity. The flesh that seemed so solid turns out to be composed of swiftly moving particles - often orbiting each other – in which great exchanges of energy continually occur.

The stuff, the space outside of your body, is composed of the same elements, but in different proportions. There is a constant physical inter¬change between the structure you call your body and the space outside it; chemical interactions, basic exchanges without which life as you know it would be impossible.

To hold your breath is to die. Breath, which represents the most intimate and most necessary of your physical sensations, must flow out from what you are, passing into the world that seems to be not you. Physically, portions of you leave your body constantly and intermix with the ele¬ments. You know what happens when adrenalin is released through the bloodstream. It stirs you up and prepares you for action. But in other ways the adrenalin does not just stay in your body. It is cast into the air and it affects the atmosphere, though it is transformed.

Any of your emotions liberate hormones, but these also leave you as your breath leaves you; and in that respect you can say that you release chemicals into the air that then affect it.

Once you understand this you have only to learn to examine the nature of your beliefs, for these will automatically cause you to feel and think in certain fashions.
Your emotions follow your beliefs. It is not the other way around.

I would like you to recognize your own beliefs in several areas. You must realize that any idea you accept as truth is a belief that you hold. You must, then, take the next step and say, "It is not necessarily true, even though I believe it." You will, I hope, learn to disregard all beliefs that imply basic limitations.

Later we will discuss some of the reasons for your beliefs, but for now I simply want you to recognize them.

I am going to list some limiting false beliefs. If you find yourself agreeing with any of them, then recognize this as an area in which you must personally work.


1. Life is a valley of sorrows.

2. The body is inferior. As a vehicle of the soul it is auto¬matically degraded, tinged. You may feel that the flesh is inherently bad or evil, that its appetites are wrong. Christians may find the body deplorable, thinking that the soul descended into it -"descent" automatically meaning the change from a higher or better condition to one that is worse.

Followers of Eastern religions often feel it their duty, also, to deny the flesh, to rise above it, so to speak, into a state where nothing is desired. ("Emptiness" in Taoism, for instance.) Using a different vocabulary, they still believe that earth experience is not desirable in itself.

3. I am helpless before circumstances that I cannot control.

4. I am helpless because my personality and character were formed in infancy, and I am at the mercy of my past.

5. I am helpless because I am at the mercy of events from past lives in other incarnations, over which I now have no control. I must be punished, or I am punishing myself for unkindness’s done to others in past lives. I must accept the negative aspects of my life because of my karma.*

6. People are basically bad, and out to get me.

7. I have the truth and no one else has. Or, my group has the truth and no other group has.

8. I will grow frailer, sicker, and lose my powers as I grow old.

*In Hinduism and Buddhism, karma is thought of as the total moral sum of an individual's acts in any one life - thus determining the person's fate or destiny in the next. Seth sees reincarnational lives as all existing at once, so there is constant give-and-take among them. A "future" life, then, can affect a "past" one, so karma as it is usually considered does not apply.

9. My existence is dependent upon my experience in flesh. When my body dies my consciousness dies with it.

Now: That was a rather general list of false beliefs. Now here is a more specific list of more intimate beliefs, any of which you may have personally about yourself.

1. I am sickly, and always have been.

2. There is something wrong with money. People who have it are greedy, less spiritual than those who are poor. They are unhappier, and snobs.

3. I am not creative. I have no imagination.

4. I can never do what I want to do.

5. People dislike me.

6. I am fat.

7. I always have bad luck.

These are all beliefs held by many people. Those who have them will meet them in experience. Physical data will always seem to reinforce the beliefs, therefore, but the beliefs formed the reality. We are going to attempt to knock down such limiting concepts.

First of all, you must realize that no one can change your beliefs for you, nor can they be forced upon you from without. You can indeed change them for yourself, however, with knowledge and application.

Look about you. Your entire physical environment is the materialization of your beliefs. Your sense of joy, sorrow, health or illness - all of these are also caused by your beliefs. If you believe that a given situation should make you unhappy, then it will, and the unhappiness will then reinforce the condition.

Within you is the ability to change your ideas about reality and about yourself, to create a personal living experience that is fulfilling to your¬self and others. I would like you to write down your beliefs about your¬self as you become aware of them. Later you can use this list in a way that you do not now suspect.

Your conscious beliefs direct the functioning of your body. It is not the other way around. Your inner self adopts the physically conscious, physically focused mind as a method of allowing it to manipulate in the world that you know. The conscious mind is particularly equipped to direct outward activity, to handle waking experience and oversee physical work.

Its beliefs about the nature of reality are then given to inner portions of the self. These rely mainly upon the conscious mind's interpretation of temporal reality. The conscious mind sets the goals and the inner self brings them about, using all its facilities and inexhaustible energy.

The great value of the conscious mind lies precisely in its ability to make decisions and set directions. Its role is dual, however: It is meant to assess conditions both inside and outside, to handle data that comes from the physical world and from the inner portions of the self. It is not a closed system, then.

To be human necessitates fine discrimination in the use of such consciousness. Many people are afraid of their own thoughts. They do not examine them. They accept the beliefs of others. Such actions distort data from both within and without.

There is no battle between the intuitive self and the conscious mind. There only seems to be when the individual refuses to face all the infor¬mation that is available in his conscious mind. Sometimes it seems easier to avoid the frequent readjustments in behavior that self-examination requires. In such cases an individual collects many secondhand beliefs. Some contradict each other; the signals given to the body and to the inner self are not smoothly flowing or clear-cut, but a muddied jumble of counter-directions.

These will immediately set off alarms of various natures. The body will not function properly, or the overall emotional environment will suffer. Such reactions are actually excellent precautions, meant to be taken as a sign that change is needed.

At the same time, the inner self will transmit to the conscious mind insights and intuitions meant to clear its sight. But if you believe that the inner self is dangerous and not to be trusted, if you are afraid of dreams or any intrusive psychic material, then you deny this help and turn aside from it.

If you believe, moreover, that you must accept your difficulties, then this belief alone can deter you from solving them.

I repeat: Your ideas and beliefs form the structure of your experience. Your beliefs and the reasons for them can be found in your conscious mind. If you accept the idea that the reasons for your behavior are forever buried in the past of this life, or any other, then you will not be able to alter your experience until you change that belief I am speak¬ing now of more or less normal experience. Later we will discuss more particular areas, such as circumstances in which illnesses date from birth.

The realization that you form your own reality should be a liberating one. You are responsible for your successes and your joys. You can change those areas of your life with which you are less than pleased, but you must take the responsibility for your being.

Your spirit joined itself with flesh, and in flesh, to experience a world of incredible richness, to help create a dimension of reality of colors and of form. Your spirit was born in flesh to enrich a marvelous area of sense awareness, to feel energy made into corporeal form. You are here to use, enjoy, and express yourself through the body. You are here to aid in the great expansion of consciousness. You are not here to cry about the miseries of the human condition, but to change them when you find them not to your liking through the joy, strength and vitality that is within you; to create the spirit as faithfully and beautifully is you can in flesh.

The conscious mind allows you to look outward into the physical universe, and see the reflection of your spiritual activity, to perceive and assess your individual and joint creations.

In a manner of speaking, the conscious mind is a window through which you look outward - and looking outward, perceive the fruits of your inner mind. Often you let false beliefs blur that great vision. Your joy, vitality and accomplishment do not come from the outside to you is the result of events that "happen to you." They spring from inner events that are the result of your beliefs.