The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events

Another masterpiece from Seth, the energy personality channeled by Jane Roberts. This book covers not only the nature of reality, it also goes into great detail on how each person contributes to events that happen on a large scale.

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Your thoughts are as real as snowflakes or raindrops or clouds. They mix and merge with the thoughts of others, to form man’s livingscape, providing the vast mental elements from which physical events will be formed.

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My review will be include quite a few quotes from the book but the number of these I share here pales in comparison to the number of passages I highlighted while reading this. Seth wrote dozens of books with Jane and her husband Robert Butts, but this is one of the four that I consider the core, the must-reads, the Seth canon.

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If you can, try to sense this greater context in which you have your being. Your rewards will be astonishing. The emotional realization is what is important, of course, not simply an intellectual acceptance of the idea.

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You might say: “Of course, I realize that the weather affects my mood,” yet it will occur to very few of you that your moods have any effect upon the weather.

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While this was being written, there was an accident at the nuclear power plant at Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and the Jonestown massacre happened in Guyana. These events inclined Seth to speak at length about what nuclear power represents to humanity and how idealism can morph into fanaticism.

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The psyche expresses itself through action, of course, but it carries behind it the thrust from which life springs, and it seeks the fulfillment of the individual — and it automatically attempts to produce a social climate or civilization that is productive and creative.

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Like every other Seth book, he covers many topics in addition to the one suggested in the title. In this one, he explains how all viruses are already inside of us, how they are necessary for good health, and how disease doesn’t turn on until we decide we want to die (or become ill for other reasons).

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The healthiest body contains within it many so-called deadly viruses in what you may call (underlined) an inactive form — inactive from your viewpoint, in that they are not causing disease. They are, however, helping to maintain the body’s overall balance.

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Certain diseases can actually strengthen the body from a prior weaker state, by calling upon the body’s full defenses. Under certain conditions, some so-called disease states could insure the species’ survival.

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Seth speaks a lot about death, too; how sometimes a person or a group of people choose to die together to bring awareness to something that humanity is trying to ignore.

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[Those] plagues took rich and poor alike, however, so the complacent well-to-do could see quite clearly, for example, that to some extent sanitary conditions, privacy, peace of mind, had to be granted to the poor alike, for the results of their dissatisfaction would have quite practical results. Those were deaths of protest.

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The fact is that when death comes it is wanted; it has been chosen. The fact is that death in its way is the culmination of life, leading toward a new birth and new experience. The cells know this. So does the heart.

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No epidemic or illness or natural disaster — or stray bullet from a murderer’s gun — will kill a person who does not want to die.

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Left alone, the self and the body are so entwined that the separation would be smooth. The body would automatically follow the wishes of the inner self. In the case of suicide, for example, the self is to some extent acting out of context with the body, which still has its own will to live.

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In this book Seth explains that we have an inner ego and an outer ego, he shares more details on how Framework 1 and Framework 2 work together to create our reality, and what we’re really doing in the dreamworld.

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As you have an ego, fully conscious, directed toward the physical world, you also have what I call an inner ego, directed toward inner reality. The inner ego is fully conscious. It is a portion of you, however, that deals with the formation of events…

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There must be a psychological chamber between these two portions of the self, however — these seemingly undifferentiated areas, in which back-and-forth translations can occur. Dream periods provide that service. In dreams the two egos often merge into each other…

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The inner ego is a portion of the self, for example — is the portion of your self — that is aware of your reincarnational activities. It is the part of you that exists outside of time, yet simultaneously lives in time. The inner ego does the actual work that brings about the events you have decided upon.

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The action of the inner ego within the wider sphere of Framework 2 explains many events and seeming coincidences that otherwise seem to make no sense within your world.

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On a conscious level, and with your conscious reserves alone, you could not keep your body alive an hour. You would not know how to do it, for your life flows through you automatically and spontaneously. You take the details for granted — the breathing, the inner mechanisms of nourishment and elimination, the circulation, and the maintenance of your psychological continuity. All of that is taken care of for you in what I have termed as Framework 2.

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Thoughts have what we will for now term electromagnetic properties. In those terms your thoughts mix and match with others in Framework 2, creating mass patterns that form the overall psychological basis behind world events. Again, however, Framework 2 is not neutral, but automatically inclined toward what we will here term good or constructive developments. It is a growth medium. Constructive or “positive” feelings or thoughts are more easily materialized than “negative” ones, because they are in keeping with Framework 2’s characteristics.

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Seth also provides some details about Christ and the beginnings of Christianity. He says that the Christ figure written about in the bible is actually an amalgamation of three people (all named Christ as Christ was a common name at that time), and that the Christ figure wasn’t actually crucified in physical reality. The crucifixion that most of have been been taught was experienced by a great number of people in the dream state: the crucifixion was a psychic event, not a physical one

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Christ’s message was that each man is good inherently, and is an individualized portion of the divine — and yet a civilization based upon that precept has never been attempted. The vast social structures of Christianity were instead based upon man’s “sinful” nature — not the organizations and structures that might allow him to become good, or to obtain the goodness that Christ quite clearly perceived man already possessed.

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Christ saw that in each person divinity and humanity met — and that man survived death by virtue of his existence within the divine.

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Again, Christ was not crucified.

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Seth also speaks about how we already know (we indeed choose) the circumstances in which we will be born.

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When you enter time and physical life, you are already aware of its conditions. You are biologically and psychologically predisposed to grow within that rich environment, to contribute on all levels to the fulfillment of your species…

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Children do already possess character at birth, and the entire probable intent of their lives exists then as surely as does the probable plan for the adult body they will later possess. Consciousness forms the genes, and not the other way around.

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On these other levels the child knows, for example, of its contemporaries born at about the same time. Those plans are communicated one to the other, and probabilities instantly are set into motion in Framework 2. There will be certain cornerstone encounters in each person’s life that are set up as strong probabilities, or as plans to be grown into.

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As he does in every one of his books, Seth speaks about the nature of consciousness: how each atom and molecule possesses consciousness. He says that even the cells that make up the various organs in our body have come together in awareness of what they’re doing, that they do it joyfully for the experience of doing it and that "A cell does not fear its own death. Its identity has traveled back and forth from physical to nonphysical reality too often as a matter of course."

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All particles are psychological particles, with their own impetuses for development and value fulfillment. That is why atoms join together to form matter. They seek the fulfillment of themselves through form. They cooperatively choose the forms that they take.

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He also spends quite a bit of time talking about the purpose of and the need to listen to and express our impulses.

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Your impulses are your closest communication with your inner self, because in the waking state they are the spontaneous urgings toward action, rising from that deep inner knowledge of yourself that you have in dreams.

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In those areas where you cut down on your impulses, upon their very recognition, you close down probabilities, and prevent new beneficial acts that of themselves would lead you out of your difficulty.

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...impulses are doorways to action, satisfaction, the exertion of natural mental and physical power…

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Seth also shares information about how ancient humanity used dreams to bring certain things into being, and how each of us, each species, each being, is interconnected.

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Some of the experiences known by early man would seem quite foreign to you now.

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He had not yet covered over that process with the kind of smooth continuity that your own consciousness has now achieved — so when he thought a thought he was filled with curiosity: Where had it come from? His own consciousness, then, was forever a source of delight, its changing qualities as noticeable and apparent as the changing sky.

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There was no exterior cosmic Pied Piper, singing magical notes or playing a magical tune, urging the universe into being. The urge to be came from within, and that urge is repeated to some extent in each impulse, each urge toward action on the part of man or molecule. If you do not trust the nature of your impulses, then you do not trust the nature of your life, the nature of the universe, or the nature of your own being.

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Every time I read a Seth book I feel buoyed by his joyful spirit, I feel truth in his words, and am thankful for the strong sense of everything-is-and-will-be-okay that, thankfully, calms the concerns and fears of my life. Nature isn’t a thing that humanity can extinguish, I create my own reality, and my impulses are my inner ego trying to bring me toward my desires and my ideal expression.

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Consciousness predates physical forms. Consciousness predates the physical universe. (Long pause.) Consciousness predates all of its manifestations. The impulse to be, in any terms that you can understand, is without beginning or end.

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So, so recommended.

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