The Nature of Personal Reality: A Seth Book

If I were stranded on a desert island and could only bring one book with me, this would be it. This is a remarkable, life-changing book.

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It’s the first book I ever stole from my mother’s bookshelf and was the book that set me off on a decades-long journey to read everything that Seth was able to write with the help of Jane Roberts and her husband Robert Butts.

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In it, Seth shares the nuts and bolts of how reality actually works. He gives methods to examine our internal reality and techniques to change what we don't like. And so much more.

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This review will be chock-full of quotes from the book because his kind and vital energy comes through in even small passages of his prose. If I could, I would share entire sessions, some of them are that good (like Session 613, September 11, 1972).

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If you do not like your experience, then you must change the nature of your conscious thoughts and expectations. You must alter the kind of messages that you are sending through your thoughts to your own body, to friends and associates. Each thought has a result, in your terms. The same kind of thought, habitually repeated, will seem to have a more or less permanent effect. If you like the effect then you seldom examine the thought. If you find yourself assailed by physical difficulties, however, you begin to wonder what is wrong.

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He talks about how everything, even atoms, have consciousness.

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All consciousness has within it the deep abiding impetus to use its abilities fully, to expand its capacities, to venture joyfully beyond the seeming barriers of its own experience. The very consciousnesses within the smallest molecules cry out against any ideas of limitation. They yearn toward new forms and experiences. Even atoms, then, constantly seek to join in new organizations of structure and meaning. They do this “instinctively.”

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He shares that because time is not linear, all of our incarnations are happening now. We have the capacity to exchange information, talents, understandings with our other incarnations, and we do, in the dream state. This understanding squashes the idea that we are dealing with stuff from some other lifetime, or that we need to suffer for something we might have done in another life.

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In this book, Seth talks a lot about health, and the interconnection between spirit and flesh. He also puts words around my personal feeling that humanity can’t exist beyond Earth’s protective bio-sphere.

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The inner world of each man and woman is connected with the inner world of the earth. The spirit becomes flesh. Part of each individual’s soul, then, is intimately connected with what we will call the world’s soul, or the soul of the earth. The smallest blade of grass, or flower, is aware of this connection, and without reasoning comprehends its position, its uniqueness and its source of vitality. The atoms and molecules that compose all objects, whether it be the body of a person, a table, a stone or a frog, know the great passive thrust of creativity that lies beneath their own existence, and upon which their individuality floats, distinct, clear and unassailable.

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And these comments,

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These feeling-tones, then, pervade your being. They are the form your spirit takes when combined with flesh. From them, from their core, your flesh arises. […] Your flesh springs about you in response to these inner chords of your being, and the trees, rocks, seas and mountains spring up as the body of the earth from the deep inner chords within the atoms and molecules, which are also living. […] The seemingly unconscious portions of yourself draw atoms and molecules from the air to form your image.

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For most of the book, though, Seth speaks about how our beliefs and expectations form our personal reality.

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You are in physical existence to learn and understand that your energy, translated into feelings, thoughts and emotions, causes all experience. There are no exceptions. 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.

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And these comments,

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The artist does not identify with the colors he uses. He knows he chooses them, and applies them with a brush. So you paint your reality with your ideas in the same manner. You are not your ideas, nor even your thoughts. You are the self who experiences them. […] So if you believe that you are at the mercy of physical events, you entertain a false belief. If you feel that your present experience was set in circumstances beyond your control, you entertain a false belief.

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He also speaks about how our beliefs about getting older shape how we will experience our later years. If we believe it’s normal for an older person to lose their hearing, or their sight, or to have less energy, then that’s what we’ll experience.

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Seth also shares information related to how we each have a part to play in the weather and natural disasters, using as an example, a major flood that happened in 1972 in the town where Jane and Robert lived. His comments on this topic were later expanded to an entire book (also excellent) called, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, published in 1981.

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In this book, Seth spends a bit of time talking about the fallacy of time and space.

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Some feelings and thoughts are translated into structures that you call objects; these exist, in your terms, in a medium you call space. Others are translated instead into psychological structures called events, that seem to exist in a medium you call time. 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. So your inner experience is translated in those terms. Even the duration of an event or object in space or time is determined by the intensity of the thoughts or emotions that gave it birth.

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He also shares some fascinating info about the difference between natural guilt and taught guilt, and how natural guilt arose out of the growth of the conscious mind, out of the 'moment of reflection' that separates humanity from the animal kingdom.

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Natural guilt is also highly connected with memory, and arose hand in hand with mankind’s excursion into the experience of past, present and future. Natural guilt was meant as a preventive measure. It needed the existence of a sophisticated memory system in which new situations and experiences could be judged against recalled ones, and evaluations made in an in-between moment of reflection.

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Also covered in this book are: dreams, how if we follow our emotions we can become aware of our beliefs, imagination, illness, the wisdom of the flesh, the concept of sin, what happens physically when we die, the connection between mind and the brain, how if we sleep for four hours at a time we help to weave a closer connection between our conscious and unconscious mind (although there isn’t anything in our minds, Seth says, that’s truly ‘unconscious’).

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He also talks about how we can affect our past as we can affect our future, and how our beliefs filter out and choose our experience from innumerable probabilities.

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In this book, published in 1974, Seth coined the phrase “The Present is the Point of Power” which gave rise to Ram Das’ phrase “Be Here Now” and Eckhart Tolle’s “The Power of Now”. The New Age Movement was literally built on the back of Seth’s teachings.

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You must begin to trust yourself sometime. I suggest you do it now. If you do not then you will forever be looking to others to prove your own merit to you, and you will never be satisfied. Trust the miracle of your own being. Make no divisions between the physical and the spiritual in your lifetimes, for the spiritual speaks with a physical voice and the corporeal body is the creation of the spirit.

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You are given the gift of the gods; you create your reality according to your beliefs; yours is the creative energy that makes your world; there are no limitations to the self except those you believe in.

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I can’t recommend this book enough. Like all of Seth's works, this imparts a joyful vitality and leaves the reader empowered in the truth of their being. Please, please read this. You will be deeply, positively changed by it.