Library » Integral » Seth on “The Origins of the Universe and of the Species” ~ An Integral Conscious Creation Myth

By Paul M. Helfrich, Ph.D.

This compilation may only be used for private study, scholarship, or research.

Click here to download PDF version.

Note: this Integral Conscious Creation essay was originally published in thirteen segments on the Sethnet email list between January 10, 2001 and February 16, 2001.

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Acknowledgments

This essay is dedicated to the memory of Stan Ulkowski. Without Stan’s hard work and dedication in creating Seth Network International – the group that brought so many Seth readers together from all parts of the world in the 1990s – this compilation would not exist in its present form.

Kudos, love, and high-fives go out to all my compatriots and teachers on the Sethnet email list at Yahoo! Groups. Thanks for helping me to experience and ponder the rich subtext within Seth’s ideas and also providing a challenging and creative public forum in which to immerse myself.

There are also many additional people whose creative efforts and pursuit of excellence helped to inspire this compilation. Heart-felt thanks go out to Don Beck, Rob Butts, “the unsinkable” Lynda Dahl, Laurel Davies-Butts, Mary Dillman, Elias, Mary Ennis, Serge Grandbois, Joyce A. Kovelman, Kris, Barry Noonan, Gregory Polson, Bob Proctor, Jane Roberts, Mary Rouen, Seth, Rick Stack, Michael Steffen, Robert Tyrka, and Ken Wilber.

To Elena de la Peña: thanks for being a friend and an editor extraordinaire.

Special thanks go to my “partner in time” – Joanne – whose extraordinary dedication to the pursuit of excellence, creativity, and endless love made this little project possible. I love you my ancient friend!

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Foreword
by Paul M. Helfrich

“Row, row, row your boat, gently down the stream, merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily, life is but a dream.” – Children’s Song

Religious and scientific belief systems currently dominate our worldviews in the West. They contain officially accepted views about ourselves, our universe, and how we can all get along. They also provide a subset of beliefs called “creation myths” that explain the origins of our universe, planet, and all life, including the morals and laws that “govern” each. Religion and science’s unique creation myths have competed for prominence over the past three hundred years.

In the biblical story, our universe was created in seven days by a Causal Consciousness, conventionally termed God, who placed humans as the caretakers of all living things along with a moral code to govern all behavior. The first man – a fully formed adult – “poofed” into existence in a Paradise called The Garden of Eden. He served as a progenitor for the first woman, and thus had dominion over her. However, a demon in the guise of a serpent tricked this woman to eat from the Tree of Knowledge, thus committing the first sin. Ever since, humanity as been cursed as the descendents of these original sinners, but can be redeemed in a spiritual domain ruled by Causal Consciousness.

In the scientific story, our universe was created by a random Big Bang followed by a process called evolution guided by the principles of natural selection and “selfish” genetic mutation. Evolution, and thus our universe, is basically meaningless and amoral because science deals only in facts, objects, and processes from the objectivity of third person perspectives. Humanity is neither cursed, nor blessed, just challenged to adapt as best it can to overall life conditions. There is only physical life, and death is the end. As such, there are no spiritual domains or beings.

We can broadly characterize the religious story as premodern, and the scientific story as modern. According to German sociologist Max Weber, modernity is defined by the separation of three premodern “values spheres” – science, art, and morals. In premodern times, they were controlled and enforced by the Church. If you broke the law, your soul could be damned to an eternity of punishment in Hell. Thus, moderns saw the separation of “values spheres” as a healthy sociological step forward, one that allowed all three disciplines to develop independently. Art and literature, in terms of the 16th century Renaissance, and science, in terms of the 17th century Enlightenment, blossomed into new and exciting forms.

So, the modern worldview slowly began to emerge over five centuries ago. By the 17th century, Descartes reduced the idea of Casual Consciousness, found in all premodern religions, to a body/mind. In the 18th century, Newton outlined the mechanical laws that governed this body/mind. By the mid-19th century, Darwin and Wallace detailed biological evolution and natural selection that randomly produced this body/mind. In the mid-20th century, as students of William James in America, and Sigmund Freud in Europe codified modern psychology, the consciousness of this body/mind – now with a very small “c” – was reduced to a byproduct of brain chemistry. Body in the form of quantum fields, DNA, genes, and hormones caused mind.

However, there was a problem. As modern science produced centuries of discoveries that shredded premodern religious claims of scripture as Absolute Truth (e.g. Copernicus, Galileo, Kepler, etc.), it declared its way of knowing through third person objectivity as the only real way to know truth. The notion of first person subjectivity was marginalized, replaced by third person facts, objects, and processes. As the modern “values spheres” splintered further into extreme forms, Scientism and its subset Evolutionism were born. These modern “religions” relied on the same faith as premodern religion in that it could not provide a valid scientific proof that scientific method was the only way to know truth.

Scientism and Evolutionism thus took their place next to Creationism in various institutional forms. Though the premodern religions remained intact during the modern era, they lost political, military, and economic power. The value sphere of morals and ethics were still linked to the disciplines of theology, philosophy, and even science. Thus, today we still have premodern and modern worldviews competing with each other. For example, witness the efforts in the United States to have Creationism, in the sophisticated guise of Intelligent Design theory, mandated in public schools as a viable alternative to Darwin and Evolution. In 2005 there are seventeen states with attempts to legislate Intelligent Design into high school curriculum. This is misguided, of course, as modern science has proven that Creationism based on The Bible is empirically false.

However, the strength of the great premodern religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hindu, Buddhist, Taoist, etc.) was that they conceptualized the universe as a “Great Chain of Being” – a series of nested fields reaching from body to soul to Causal Consciousness. The Great Chain was mapped over thousands of years by the great mystics (e.g., Buddha, Plato, Christ, Plotinus, Shankara, Patanjali, Lao Tzu, Nagarjuna, Padmasambhava, etc.). They relied on first person subjectivity to discern The Great Chain from within. Thus, the premodern notion of Consciousness – with a capital “C” – remains today, but it’s been completely dissociated from the modern disciplines that define consciousness with a very, very small “c.” Efforts, like Intelligent Design, show that while Causal Consciousness has taken a beating in modern worldviews, it desperately seeks a comeback. The main problem is the religious baggage that accompanies Intelligent Design.

What begins to define postmodernity, then, are criticisms of the excesses of modern science, art, and morals that emerge in force during the 20th century. For example, important critiques issued from philosophers like Foucault, Derrida, Lacan, and Lyotard. They showed brilliantly that all languages carry hidden assumptions, power drives, and subconscious agendas within all three modern “values spheres.” Further, they showed how the interpretation of any text, artwork, or equation was based on highly subjective first person perspectives and social contexts, and contexts become very relative, not absolute. Still, the postmodern era is embryonic in relation to its predecessors and began to gain prominence only fifty years ago.

By the beginning of the 21st century, then, we have three broad worldviews vying for dominance in the West: premodern (religious), modern (scientific), and postmodern (relativistic). (1) Each has its own creation myths. According to developmental psychologists (Beck, Cowan, and Wilber) roughly 40% of the global population still hold premodern worldviews based upon religious scriptures, 30% hold modern worldviews that include the Big Bang and Darwinian Evolution, and 25% subscribe to emergent postmodern worldviews with no central creation myth. For example, when Bill Moyers asked Joseph Campbell what the world needed during a mid-1980’s interview, Campbell replied, “a new myth.” He didn’t know the specifics, but he knew it had to be holistic and worldcentric – encompass the entire planet and all people, not just one region, set of chosen people, or Holders of The Way.

Developmental sociologists have shown that human evolution, while far from a linear process, consists of worldviews that gradually unfold hierarchically in stages of increased complexity. Thus, each subsequent stage is built upon the foundation that preceded it. Each stage, in turn, creates new challenges that can only be solved by more sophisticated approaches or risk regression, as in the case of a catastrophic nuclear war, global warming, religious fanaticism, etc., in the present day. Albert Einstein intuited this when he said, “The significant problems we face can never be solved at the level of thinking that created them.”

Seth, channeled by Jane Roberts (1929-1984), put it this way:

“Consciousness, by its nature, continually expands. The nature of consciousness, as you understand it as a species will, in one way or another, lead you beyond your limited ideas of reality, for your experience will set challenges that cannot be solved within your current framework. Those problems set by one level of consciousness will automatically cause breakthroughs into other areas of conscious activity, where solutions can be found.” (2)

In 1949 Swiss social anthropologist Jean Gebser detailed five very general stages of the average mode of cultural development: archaic (foraging), magic (horticultural), mythic (agrarian), rational (industrial), and integral (informational). Thus, current variations of premodern worldviews (mythic/agrarian) originated over 9,000 years ago and simultaneously exist with modern (rational/industrial), and emergent postmodern (integral/informational). The global dynamics between these three main worldviews fuel current social, economic, religious, political, and spiritual challenges. The scale of complexity is unprecedented, and many writers have detected emerging postmodern worldviews in this frothy mix. For instance, Joseph Campbell’s The Hero of a Thousand Faces, Michael Murphy’s The Future of the Body, Paul Ray and Sherry Anderson’s Cultural Creatives, Willis Harman’s Global Mind Change, Peter Russell’s Waking Up in Time, Marilyn Ferguson’s Aquarian Conspiracy, Mark Woodhouse’s Paradigm Wars: Worldviews for a New Age, Don Beck and Chris Cowan’s Spiral Dynamics, Ken Wilber’s Boomeritis, and many, many more (some are featured throughout).

What is the Role of Myth in a Postmodern World?

What kinds of postmodern myths are struggling to be born? How do they deal with Consciousness with a capital “C” and small “c”? As we will see, currently emerging myths seek to integrate the gems of truth found in premodern and modern worldviews to bring Consciousness and consciousness back into the picture. They attempt to heal what some see as the pathological fragmentation of the modern value spheres into a more integral and holistic worldview.

Myths are belief systems in narrative form that contain intellectual, intuitive, and emotional qualities. Myths provide an important social framework, sense of continuity, and deep meaning that permeate cultural identities.

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines mythology as:

“1. An allegorical narrative, 2. A body of myths: as a. the myths dealing with gods, demi-gods, or legendary heroes of a particular people, b. mythos.” (3)

According to Joseph Campbell, one of the 20th century’s leading mythologists:

“Mythology is an organization of images metaphoric of experience, action, and fulfillment of the human spirit in the field of a given culture at a given time.” (4)

In terms of political and economic capital, the dominant creation myth that currently pervades Western society is based on scientific beliefs. According to philosopher, scientist, and futurist Willis Harman the following is a summary of Western Society’s Central Myth:

“In the beginning was the Big Bang. Following that were something like 15 billion years of evolution of stars and planets; the coming together of certain chemicals to create life on planet Earth; the further evolution of more complex life forms, and their sorting out through natural selection; the resulting formation of increasingly complex neuronal networks culminating in the human brain with its fantastic capabilities. Thus the essential characteristics of human nature are to be understood as the consequence of an evolutionary succession of random events (from the origin of life to later mutations) and natural selections, and hence accidental – without purpose or meaning.

“The essence of ourselves is to be found in a material substance, the DNA with which we are born. Since our basic drives appear to be survival, pleasure, and procreation, it is only natural that the economy should have become the paramount institution of modern society, around which everything else revolves, and that economic logic and values should be the primary guides to our individual and collective decision making. It is only natural that we should treat the Earth and our fellow creatures as ’resources,’ to be used in the service of the economy, and that we should view controlling nature through technology as one of modern society’s most impressive achievements.

“This central myth infuses and informs our education, healthcare policy, legal justice system, business, and other social institutions. If it were to be found fundamentally in error, the implications are far-reaching.” (5)

As we begin the new millennium there is strong evidence that this central myth is morphing before our eyes. Physicists report that our officially accepted view of space-time is changing. A recent headline in the L.A. Times announced “Time, Space Obsolete in New View of Universe.” It discussed an emerging scientific theory, called string theory, that speculates about infinitesimally small “energy strings” vibrating in a multidimensional pattern literally creating “cosmic music” that form the building blocks for our physical universe.

Further, there is evidence to support the premodern, perennial wisdom claims that our universe originates “outside” of space-time in what physicists term to be “non-local” implicate order or quantum potential (Bohm, Wolf, Goswami, Laszlo, Tiller). This process can be understood through the behavior of sub-atomic particles called photons that act as both a particle and a wave front. When observed as a particle, they can only be in one place at a time. When observed as a wave, they can literally be in two places at once and simultaneously exist in a non-local state.

Non-locality was proposed in a scientific principle known as Bell’s Theorem (1964) and confirmed by Alain Aspect and collaborators (1982). It shows how photons can be split apart and instantly communicate phase or status changes while “separated.” Non-locality implies the existence of a hidden field that is not perceivable by our physical senses and their extensions (telescopes and microscopes). It is now speculated by quantum scientists that this hidden, nonphysical field is the source for our physical universe.

Another example that supports the concept of non-locality is the work of English biologist Rupert Sheldrake. His experiments deal with morphic fields. For instance, Sheldrake did a study on rats’ ability to learn the same maze in two discrete geographical locations. The first group took a certain amount of time to learn the maze. The subsequent group, however, learned the maze in a significantly less period of time. Sheldrake speculates that the learning done by the first group was somehow available to the second group via a non-local morphic field.

Could scientific discoveries work in similar fashion? There are numerous examples of similar ideas being “discovered” at more or less the same time. For example, Edison’s and Tesla’s numerous electrical inventions, and Leibniz’s and Newton’s inventing calculus. Could these ideas “be in the air” in such a way that individuals draw on some type of non-local morphic field to accelerate invention and problem solving?

Whether or not microscopic quantum effects scale up to macroscopic effects in biological systems and human beings remains controversial. However, from Kekulé’s mapping the benzene molecule decades before it could be verified on the electron microscope, to Charles Tart’s research on psi (telepathy, clairvoyance, psychokinesis, precognition), to Stephen LaBerge’s research on lucid dreaming, to Carl Jung and Joseph Campbell’s identifying common elements in premodern myths, we find evidence that personal and cultural growth may be assisted by non-local energy fields cast in the creative guise of invention, dreams, and mythos.

Thus, there are emerging postmodern myths in the air, as Joseph Campbell saw in the 1980s. But, they compete with the status quo of premodern and modern myths. At first, new myths are condemned as heretical, then marginalized as trivial, until finally they are accepted as truth. As such, we are in a transition between Central Myths. According to Roger Walsh, a psychiatrist and meditator:

“Myths are grand stories that portray, in an imaginative and symbolic manner, the basic mental structures, understanding and worldview created by a culture and which in turn create and maintain that culture. As such, myths seem to be essential to cultural coherence and well-being and much of our contemporary confusion may reflect the fact that our culture is ’between myths.’ Ideally, myths complement and harmonize with other modes of knowing and explanation such as rational knowledge and transrational wisdom. However, problems arise when symbolic myths are not recognized as such but are mistaken for empirical facts or linear logic.” (6)

Therefore, postmodern myths are not to be taken literally, but metaphorically. Premodern worldviews tend to interpret myth in literal, concrete terms. If the Holy Book says we’re descended from star brothers, then it’s assumed to be literally true. No further evidence is required. Modern worldviews tend to rely on the proof of five senses and third person perspectives. They discount all first person, transrational perspectives as psychosis or infantile dissociation. Postmodern worldviews include rational and empirical proof, and integrate subjective, first person experience. They also understand the crucial difference between prerational and transrational experience. Thus, they include emotions, feelings, and deep intuitions, but not at the expense of intellect and reason. The idea is not to throw out the transcendental baby with the religious bathwater.

Finally, the emerging postmodern Central Myth is not set in stone. It is still a matter of collective choice, imagination, and creativity. We are in the midst of a profound shift in consciousness that integrates the gems from premodern myths (Consciousness with a capital “C”) and modern myths (Big Bang, Evolution, and consciousness with a small “c”). No one knows what will unfold during this century, but it will be an incredible ride!

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Introduction

“Dawn of light lying between a silence and sold sources,
“Chased amid fusions of wonder, in moments hardly seen forgotten,
“Coloured in pastures of chance dancing leaves cast spells of challenge,
“Amused but real in thought, we fled from the sea whole.
“Dawn of thought transfered through moments of days undersearching earth
“Revealing corridors of time provoking memories, disjointed but with purpose,
“Craving penetrations offer links with the self instructors sharp
“And tender love as we took to the air, a picture of distance.
“Dawn of our power we amuse redescending as fast as misused
“Expression, as only to teach love as to reveal passion chasing
“Late into corners, and we danced from the ocean.
“Dawn of love sent within us colours of awakening among the many
“Won't to follow, only tunes of a different age.
“As the links span our endless caresses for the freedom of life everlasting.” ~ YES, Tales of Topographic Oceans, 1974.

As human history unfolds, old myths calcify and new ones emerge. This has been chronicled by anthropologists (Mead), mythologists (Campbell), and social psychologists (Gebser, Graves, Beck, Wilber). In premodern cultures we find consistent evidence of a Causal Consciousness. While there are variations on Its Origin, Purpose, and Nature, many traditions claim this Casual Consciousness is interpenetrated – holistically nested – within a “Great Chain of Being” that extends from body to soul to Causal Spirit. Many also suggest that Causal Spirit isn’t really “out there” or “up in the sky” somewhere, but literally a part of you, me, and everything around us. In other words, It is simultaneously in the world (immanent) and not of the world (transcendent). Jane Roberts used the term All-That-Is to express this fundamental paradox.

These and other ideas are found in the creation myth presented by Seth in Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, Vol. 1 (1986). Could this be an emerging postmodern Central Myth that will replace the biblical and Big Bang stories? It is too soon to tell. Our world is changing too quickly to accurately predict what may occur even twenty years from now. But, Seth’s creation myth contains the requisite, important gems from premodern and modern myths, along with many new concepts that may be consonant with twenty-first century thought and beyond.

Jane Roberts began to deliver the Seth material in 1963. Many of the central concepts outlined in the first 800 sessions set the stage for this creation myth. Seth mentioned in the introduction to Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment that it was his most ambitious work to date, though ironically, it was to be his last major theoretical work before Jane Roberts passed away in 1984. As such, this tale forms the pinnacle of Seth’s cosmological and theoretical musings. Related concepts include:

• All-That-Is/consciousness units (CUs/causal field)
• sleepwalkers/electromagnetic energy units (EEs/subtle field)
• Frameworks 4, 3, 2 (subtle field)
• the dream state (subtle field) functions as a “language of translation” for the waking state (physical field)
• Framework 1 (physical field)
• the paradoxical “before the beginning”
• families of consciousness (innate intention)
• the multidimensional psyche (outer ego, subconscious, inner ego)
• the inner senses (deep intuitions/translogical hyperception)
• reincarnation in the context of simultaneous time frameworks
• probabilities

To his credit, Seth constantly works around the inherent limitations of English and its penchant for linear cognitive constructs that deal with objects and processes in space and time. Seth uses simple metaphors to explain complex concepts like the emergence of Mind into Matter, Timelessness into Time, Spacelessness into Space, dream oceans, plants, and bodies into physical oceans, plants, and bodies.

Admittedly, this tale is a bit on the esoteric side, and may be difficult to understand for those who are not familiar with the fifteen books that precede Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment. Further, Seth employs a host of metaphors and analogies to describe something that must be directly experienced to be fully understood. As such, his tale, its metaphors and analogies are not to be taken literally because they are easy to distort into premodern or modern dogma. That’s another reason why we are talking about them in the context of myth and intuitive, first person perspectives.

Thus, Seth figuratively describes in linear terms something that is inherently nonlinear – Causal Consciousness dreaming ItSelf into physical form. Is it possible that the creation of the world happened in only seven days? Highly unlikely. Could a Big Bang randomly occur from nothingness? Highly plausible. But what was the origin of the inner world that “preceded” the Big Bang? These perennial questions continue to occupy the best theological, philosophical, and scientific minds due to their paradoxical nature.

The answers, however, seem paradoxical when seen only through a modern worldview limited to five physical senses, third person perspectives, and intellect stripped of intuition and emotions. This is why some get confused and seek comfort in older myths that are simpler and easier to digest. Seth’s tale is subtle, for sure, but like many of his concepts it can only be fully understood through a blend of intuition, emotions, and intellect. Thus, the following abridged compilation and exegesis are only a primer meant to set the stage.

Also, it is easy to get distracted by the large amount of material concerning Jane Roberts’s advancing illness and sinful self material in volume one. Husband Rob Butts included several non-book sessions that, while serving to beautifully elaborate related concepts and the minutiae of everyday life, unfortunately break up the flow of Seth’s original book dictation.

As Rob says in his notes, the process of editing a Seth book for him was not what to include, but what to leave out. So while the original books are solid testaments and worthy creative endeavors to be savored, Seth’s creation myth is so full of paradoxes in terms of modern cause and effect thinking that it is my hope its riches may be more clearly discerned in this abridged format.

According to Seth, the genesis of the Kosmos occurs in each moment. As such, there is literally no beginning and no end because beginning and end are ongoing processes. This primordial action of creation – of genesis – occurs in every quantum pulse, in every moment point of a “Great Chain of Being” that extends from body to soul to Causal Spirit. So we are literally beginning and ending anew in each nanosecond. But we’re getting ahead of the story.

When reading Seth’s words keep in mind that his use of the words “man” and “mankind” is a reflection of the times and that gender-neutral language like “human” and “humankind” was not yet the convention that it is today. Still, it did not seem appropriate to edit and substitute these terms with human or humankind, though I don’t feel that Seth or Jane would have any problem with that.

Finally, by way of introduction I’ve included an excerpt from The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression to set the stage for the material that follows from the first five chapters of Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment. I’ve also included a Concept Summary and occasional Comments for subsequent excerpts to highlight basic concepts for further contemplation.

At this point it’s best left to Seth to introduce what I’m calling An Integral Conscious Creation Myth. Enjoy.

“... This tale, I admit, is far more difficult to understand than a simple [premodern] story of God’s creation of the world, or its actual production in a meaningless [modern] universe through the slippery hand of chance – and yet my [postmodern] story is more magnificent because elements of its truth will find resonance in the minds and hearts of those open enough to listen. For men’s minds themselves are alive with the desire to read properly, and they are aware of their own vast heritage. It is not simply that man has a soul that is somehow blessed while the rest of him is not, but that in those terms everything [he knows], regardless of size or degree, is made of ‘soul stuff’.” – Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, Vol. 1, Session 892, January 02, 1980.

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Seth on “The Origins of the Universe and of the Species” (7)

Prologue: The Nature of the Psyche: Its Human Expression, Session 796, March 07, 1977:

“There is no such thing, in your terms, as nonliving matter. There is simply a point that you recognize as having the characteristics that you have ascribed to life, or living conditions – a point that meets the requirements that you have arbitrarily set.

“This makes it highly difficult in a discussion, however, for there is no particular point at which life was inserted into nonliving matter. There is no point at which consciousness emerged. Consciousness is within the tiniest particle, whatever its life conditions seem to be, or however it might seem to lack those conditions you call living.

“...Words do nearly forsake me, the semantic differences are so vast. If I say to you: ‘Life came from a dream,’ such a statement sounds meaningless. Yet as your physical reality personally is largely dependent upon your dreaming state, and impossible without it, so in the same way the first cell was physically materialized and actual only because of its own inner reality of consciousness.

“In those terms there was a point where consciousness impressed itself into matter through intent, or formed itself into matter. That ‘breakthrough’ cannot be logically explained, but only compared to, say, an illumination – that is, a light everywhere occurring at once, that became a medium for life in your terms. It had nothing to do with the propensity of certain kinds of cells to reproduce, but with an overall illumination that set the conditions in which life as you think of it was possible – and at that imaginary hypothetical point, all species became latent.

“There was no point at which consciousness was introduced because consciousness was the illumination from which the first cells emerged. That illumination was everywhere then, at every point aware of itself and of the conditions formed by its presence. In your terms each species is aware of the conditions of each other species, and of the entire environment. In those terms the environment forms the species and the species forms the environment.

“... To those who want easy answers, this is no answer, I admit. There is, I know, in heroic terms a love, a knowledge, a compassion, a creativity that can be assigned to All-That-Is, which is within each creature. I know that each smallest ‘particle’ of consciousness can never be broken down, and that each contains an infinite capacity for creativity and development – and that each is innately blessed.

“There is a design and a designer, but they are so combined, the one within and the one without, that it is impossible to separate them. The Creator is also within its creations and the creations themselves are gifted with creativity.”

Session 797, March 14, 1977.

“... When you ask about the beginning of a universe, you are speaking of a visible universe.

“There is consciousness with each conceivable hypothetical point within the universe. There is therefore ‘an invisible universe’ out of which the visible or objective universe springs.

“I do not mean to overemphasize the point that this particular material is most difficult to explain, yet I can hardly stress the issue too strongly.

“... Your universe did not emerge at any one point, therefore, or with any one initial cell – but everywhere it began to exist at once, as the inner pulsations of the invisible universe reached certain intensities that ‘impregnated’ the entire physical system simultaneously.

“In this case, first of all light appeared. At the same time EE (electromagnetic energy) units became manifest, impinging from the invisible universe into definition. Again, because of the psychological strength of preconceived notions, I have to work my way around many of your concepts. Yet in much of my material I have definitely implied what I am saying now, but the implications must have passed you by.

“I have said, for example, that the universe expands as an idea does, and so the visible universe sprang into being in the same manner. The whole affair is quite complicated since – again as I have intimated – the world freshly springs into new creativity at each moment. No matter what your version of creativity, or the creation of the world, you are stuck with questions of where such energy came from, for it seems that unimaginable energy was released more or less at one time, and that this energy must then run out.

“The same energy, however, still gives birth anew to the universe. In those terms, it is still being created. The EE units, impressing a probable physical field, contain within them the latent knowledge of all of the various species that can emerge under those conditions. The groupings ‘begin’ in the invisible universe. You can say that it took untold centuries for the EE units ‘initially’ to combine, form classifications of matter and various species; or you can say that this process happened at once. It is according to your relative position, but the physical universe was everywhere seeded, impregnated, simultaneously. On the other hand, this still happens, and there is no real ‘coming-in’ point.

“... You distinguish between consciousness and your own version, which you consider consciousness of self. When I speak of atoms and molecules having consciousness, I mean that they possess a consciousness of themselves as identities. I do not mean that they love or hate, in your terms, but that they are aware of the own separateness, and aware of the ways in which that separateness cooperates to form other organizations.

“They are innately aware, in fact, of all such probable cooperative ventures, and imbued with the ‘drive’ for value fulfillment. Every known species was inherently ‘present’ with the overall impregnation of the visible universe, then.

“If the universe were a painting, for example, the painter would not have first painted darkness, then an explosion, then a cell, then the joining together of groups of cells into a simple organism, then that organism’s multiplication into others like it, or traced a pattern from an amoeba or a paramecium on upward – but he or she would have instead begun with a panel of light, an underpainting, in which all of the world’s organisms were included, though not in detail. Then in a creativity that came from the painting itself the colors would grow rich, the species attain their delineations, the winds blow and the seas move with the tides.

“The motion and energy of the universe still come from within. I certainly realize that this is hardly a scientific statement – yet the moment that All-That-Is conceived of a physical universe it was invisibly created, endowed with creativity, and bound to emerge.

“Because each hypothetical, conceivable portion of the universe is conscious, the Planner is within the plan itself in the greatest of terms – perhaps basically inconceivable to you. There is of course no ‘outside’ into which the invisible universe materialized, since all does indeed exist in a mental, psychic, or spiritual realm quite impossible to describe. To you your universe seems, now, objective and real, and it seems to you that at one time at least this was not the case, so you ask about its creation and the evolution of the species. My answer has been couched in the terms in which the question is generally asked.

“While you believe in and experience the passage of time, then such questions will naturally occur to you, and in that fashion. Within that framework they make sense. When you begin to question the nature of time itself, then the ‘when’ of the universe is beside the point.”

Session 798, March 21, 1977:

“... Your next question is easy to anticipate, of course, for you will want to know the origin of that ‘interior’ universe from which I have said the exterior one ever emerges – and here we must part company with treasured objectivity, and enter instead a mental domain, in which it is seen that contradictions are not errors; an inner domain large enough to contain contradictions at one level, for at another level they are seen to be no contradictions at all.

“... The answers to the origins of the universe and of the species lie, I’m afraid, in realms that you have largely ignored – precisely in those domains that you have considered least scientific, and in those that it appeared would yield the least practical results.

“Your methods will simply bring you pat, manufactured results and answers. They will satisfy neither the intellect nor the soul. Since your universe springs from an inner one, and since that inner one pervades each nook and cranny of your own existence you must look where you have not before – into the reality of your own minds and emotions. You must look to the natural universe that you know. You must look with your intuitions and creative instincts at the creatures about you, seeing them not as other species with certain habits, not as inferior properties of the earth, to be dissected, but as living examples of the nature of the universe, in constant being and transformation.

“You must study the quality of life, dare to follow the patterns of your own thoughts and emotions, and to ride that mobility, for in that mobility there are hints of the origin of the universe and of the psyche. The poet’s view of the universe and of nature is more scientific, then, than the scientists’, for more of nature is comprehended.

“The child, laughing with joy and awe at the sight of the first violet understands far more in the deepest terms than a botanist who has long since forgotten the experience of perceiving one violet, though he has at his mental fingertips the names and classification of all the world’s flowers. Information is not necessarily knowledge or comprehension.

“... In a larger level of actuality, then, there is no beginning or end to the universe, and at that level there are no contradictions. There is no beginning or end to the psyche either. You may say: ‘Granted,’ yet persist, saying: ‘In our terms, however, when did the world begin, and in what manner?’ Yet the very attempt to place such an origin in time makes almost any answer distorted.

“The truth is that the answers lie in your own experience. They are implied in your own spontaneous behavior – that is, in the wondrous activity of your bodies and minds.”

© Robert F. Butts, All Rights Reserved.

Summary of Concepts:

– Any attempt to discuss the emergence of physical consciousness begins with an exploration of Seth’s cosmology – All-That-Is as a “Great Chain of Being” that extends from Causal Spirit to soul to body. The fields of Spirit and soul are nonphysical. If “God is a verb,” as Buckminster Fuller said, then All-That-is is an eternal action of becoming, not just a thing. Seth’s god concept is genderless and timeless – Causal Consciousness that is both transcendent (nonphysical) and immanent (physical).

– All-That-Is consists of spiritual, psychic, mental, and physical fields permeated by Consciousness. Time frameworks are only the thin outer crust of a conscious multiverse.

– Aspects of All-That-Is exist in a pre-material, subtle energy form called EE units (electromagnetic energy). EEs are faster than light and “ear-marked” for physical manifestation, but not yet physical.

(Later, we’ll see that EE units consist of “groups” of causal energy called consciousness units [CUs]. For now, imagine EEs as groupings of individual CUs, similar to the way molecules are made of atoms.)

– All-That-Is has no beginning or end, so the answers to the origins of the universe, the psyche, and all species lie in understanding how Consciousness is eternal and omnipresent in Its Many Forms (to be elaborated on later, hey, this is just a Prologue :-).

Comments:

– In Seth’s theology, God is not a giant old white man with a big belly, gray beard, and occasionally nasty temperament that lives in the sky where he rules over His dominion. Nor is God a wise elder woman dressed in flowing robes communing with Nature. Both are premodern projections of anthropomorphized God-As-Human-Beings. The former was an often dysfunctional paternal authority figure, the latter often demanded human sacrifice to insure fertility, good crops, and sun/moon cycles.

We cannot fully understand the origins and nature of the All-That-Is, the psyche, and universe from the limited picture of reality presented by our five senses, third person perspectives, and intellect alone. We also need to incorporate our deep intuitions, first person perspectives, and our emotions to gain deeper conceptual understanding (can you say, “inner senses” or “psy-time?”).

– Finally, here is a list of Seth’s nine inner senses first published in The Seth Material (1970):

• inner vibrational touch
• psychological time
• perception of past, present, and future
• the conceptual sense
• cognition of knowledgeable essence
• innate working knowledge of the basic vitality of the universe
• expansion or contraction of the tissue capsule
• disentanglement from camouflage
• diffusion by the energy personality [essence]

Though a detailed review is beyond the scope of this essay there is more information available. [Follow this link to The Inner Senses – An Introduction & Overview.] Seth has also provided a rich set of exercises that allow anyone to explore and practice using their inner senses. [Follow this link for a Summary of Seth/Jane Roberts Exercises.]

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Seth on “Before the Beginning” (8)

Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, Vol. 1, Session 883, October 01, 1979:

“You live your lives through your own subjective knowing, to begin with, and I will try to arouse within your own consciousnesses memories of events with which your own inner psyches were intimately involved as the world was formed – and though these may appear to be past events, they are even now occurring.

“Before the beginning of the universe, we will postulate the existence of an omnipotent, creative source. We will hope to show that this divine subjectivity is as present in the world of your experience as it was before the beginning of the universe. Again, I refer to this original subjectivity as All-That-Is. I am making an attempt to verbalize concepts that almost defy the edges of the intellect, unless that intellect is thoroughly reinforced by the intuition’s strength. So you will need to use your mind and your own intuitions as you read this book.

“All-That-Is, before the beginning contained within itself the infinite thrust of all possible creations. All-That-Is possessed a creativity of such magnificence that its slightest imaginings, dreams, thoughts, feelings or moods attained a kind of reality, a vividness, an intensity, that almost demanded freedom. Freedom from what? Freedom to do what? Freedom to be what?

“The experience, the subjective universe, the ‘mind’ of All-That-Is, was so brilliant, so distinct, that All-That-Is almost became lost, mentally wandering within this ever-flourishing, ever-growing interior landscape. Each thought, feeling, dream, or mood was itself indelibly marked with all of the attributes of this infinite subjectivity. Each glowed and quivered with its own creativity, its own desire to create as it had been created.

“Before the beginning there existed an interior universe that had no beginning or ending, for I am using the term ‘before the beginning’ to make matters easier for you to assimilate. (That same infinite interior universe exists now, for example.)

“All-That-Is contained within itself the knowledge of all existences, with their infinite probabilities, and ‘as soon as’ All-That-Is imagined those numberless circumstances, they existed in what I will call divine fact.

“All-That-Is knew of itself only. It was engrossed with its own subjective experiences, even divinely astonished as its own thoughts and imaginings attained their own vitality and inherited the creativity of their subjective creator. [Those thoughts and imaginings] began to have a dialogue with their ‘Maker.’

“Thoughts of such magnificent vigor began to think their own thoughts – and their thoughts thought thoughts. As if in divine astonishment and surprise, All-That-Is began to listen, and began to respond to these ‘generations’ of thoughts and dreams, for the thoughts and dreams related to each other also. There was no time, so all of this ‘was happening’ simultaneously. The order of events is being simplified. In the meantime, then, in your terms, All-That-Is spontaneously thought new thoughts and dreamed new dreams, and became involved in new imaginings – and all of these also related to those now-infinite generations of interweaving and interrelating thoughts and dreams that ‘already’ existed.

“So beside this spontaneous creation, this simultaneous ‘stream’ of divine rousing, All-That-Is began to watch the interactions that occurred among his own subjective progeny. He listened, began to respond and to answer a thought or a dream. He began to purposefully bring about those mental conditions that were requested by these generations of mental progeny. If he had been lonely before, he was no longer.

“Your language causes some difficulty here, so please accept the pronoun ‘he’ as innocuously as possible. ‘It’ sounds too neutral for my purpose, and I want to reserve the pronoun ‘she’ for some later differentiations. In basic terms, of course, All-That-Is is quite beyond any designations having to do with any one species or sex. All-That-Is, then, began to feel a growing sense of pressure as it realized that its own ever-multiplying thoughts and dreams themselves yearned to enjoy those greater gifts of creativity with which they were innately endowed.

“It is very difficult to try to assign anything like human motivation to All-That-Is. I can only say that it is possessed by ‘the need’ to lovingly create from its own being; to lovingly transform its own reality in such a way that each most slight probable consciousness can come to be; and with the need to see that any and all possible orchestrations of consciousness have the chance to emerge, to perceive and to love.

“... All-That-Is, then, became aware of a kind of creative tumult as each of its superlative thoughts and dreams, moods and feelings, strained at the very edges of their beings, looking for some then-unknown, undiscovered, as of then unthought-of release. I am saying that this mental progeny included all of the consciousnesses that [have] ever appeared or will appear upon your earth – all tenderly couched: the first human being, the first insect – each with an inner knowledge of the possibilities of its development. All-That-Is, loving its own progeny, sought within itself the answer to this divine dilemma.

“When that answer came, it involved previously unimaginable leaps of divine inspiration, and it occurred thusly: All-That-Is searched through the truly infinite assortment of its incredible progeny to see what conditions were needed for this even more magnificent dream, this dream of a freedom of objectivity. What door could open to let physical reality emerge from such an inner realm? When All-That-Is, in your terms, put all of those conditions together it saw, of course, in a flash, the mental creation of those objective worlds that would be needed – and as it imagined those worlds, in your terms, they were physically created.

“[All-That-Is] did not separate itself from those worlds, however, for they were created from its thoughts, and each one has divine content. The worlds are all created by that divine content, so that while they are on the one hand exterior, they are on the other also made of divine stuff, and each hypothetical point in your universe is in direct contact with All-That-Is in the most basic terms. The knowledge of the whole is within all of its parts – and yet All-That-Is is more than its parts.

“Divine subjectivity is indeed infinite. It can never be entirely objectified. When the worlds, yours and others, were thus created, there was indeed an explosion of unimaginable proportions, as the divine spark of inspiration exploded into objectivity.”

“The first ‘object’ was an almost unendurable mass, though it had no weight, and it exploded, instantaneously beginning processes that formed the universe – but no time was involved. The process that you might imagine took up eons occurred in the twinkling of an eye, and the initial objective materialization of the massive thought of All-That-Is burst into reality. In your terms this was a physical explosion – but in the terms of the consciousnesses involved in that breakthrough, this was experienced as a triumphant ‘first’ inspirational frenzy, a breakthrough into another kind of being.

“The earth then appeared as consciousness transformed itself into the many facets of nature. The atoms and molecules were alive, aware – they were no longer simply a part of a divine syntax, but they spoke themselves through the very nature of their being. They became the living, aware vowels and syllables through which consciousness could form matter.

“But in your terms this was still largely a dream world, though it was fully fashioned. It had, generally speaking, all of the species that you now know. These all correlated with the multitudinous kinds of consciousnesses that had clamored for release, and those consciousnesses were spontaneously endowed by All-That-Is with those forms that fit their requirements. You had the birth of individualized consciousness as you think of it into physical context. Those consciousnesses were individualized before the beginning, but not manifest. But individualized consciousness was not quite all that bold. It did not attach itself completely to its earthly forms at the start, but rested often within its ‘ancient’ divine heritage. In your terms, it is as if the earth and all of it creatures were partially dreaming, and not as focused within physical reality as they are now.

“For one thing, while individualized consciousness was within the massive subjectivity of All-That-is, it enjoyed, beside its own uniqueness, a feeling of supporting unity, a comforting knowledge that it was one with its source. So in the beginning of [your] world, consciousness fluctuated greatly, focusing gently at the start, but not quite as willing to be as fully independent as its first intent might seem.

“You had the sleepwalkers, early members of your species, whose main concentration was still veiled in that earlier subjectivity, and they were your true ancestors, in those terms.

Session 884, October 03, 1979:

“Even though this book is being dictated within time’s tradition, therefore, I must remind you that basically that tradition is not mine – and more, basically, it is not yours either.

“I used the term ‘before the beginning,’ then, and I will speak of earth’s events in certain sequences. In the deepest of terms, however, and in ways that quite scandalize the intellect when it tries to operate alone, the beginning is now. That critical explosion of divine subjectivity into objectivity is always happening, and you are being given life ‘in each moment’ because of the simultaneous nature of that divine subjectivity.”

© Robert F. Butts, All Rights Reserved.

Summary of Concepts:

(Reminder: All-That-Is means Causal Consciousness as used in the Foreword, and is a substitute for the baggage-laden “God”).

– Seth opens with a reminder that we each perceive the world through our own “subjective knowing” and an appeal to use our intellects “thoroughly reinforced by the intuition’s strength ... as [we] read this book.” In other words, our subjective knowing and intuition utilize first person perspectives (I/We) and our intellect utilizes third person perspectives (It/Its). All four perspectives provide important subjective and objective insights into this creation story.

– “Before the beginning” All-That-Is contained the infinite thrust of all possible creations. In physical terms, the potential for galaxies, solar systems, planets, ecosystems, species, genders, etc. – all things, all processes – have ALWAYS existed in latent form within some kind of nonphysical field.

– “Before the beginning” All-That-Is created nonphysical ‘generations’ of thoughts and dreams. These thoughts and dreams had such creative vitality that they manifest their own ability to think and dream. As such, they yearned for other states of being. Thus, “before the beginning” also includes the creation of an intermediary field, a subtle “dreamtime” that “preceded” the creation of the physical field (to borrow an Aboriginal creation myth term from Australia. More on this later).

– Though Seth employs the pronoun “he”, All-That-Is is genderless, being the source of all genders. “It” is too neutral for Seth’s purposes here and “she” is being saved for other references.

– Seth calls our early, nonphysical ancestors “sleepwalkers.” “Before the beginning” they were created by the thoughts and dreams of All-That-Is. “Before the beginning” they functioned in an intermediary field or “dreamtime” that “preceded” the creation of the physical field.

Seth closes with a reminder that there is no beginning or end to Consciousness, though by design there are beginnings and endings in the physical field.

Comments:

Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary defines paradox as:

“1. a tenet contrary to a received opinion, 2a. a statement that is seemingly contradictory or opposed to common sense and yet is perhaps true, 2b. a self-contradictory statement that at first seems true, 2c. an argument that apparently derives self-contradictory conclusions by valid deduction from acceptable premises, 3. one that possesses seemingly contradictory qualities or phases.” (9)

Seth’s “before the beginning” provides a great example of what I call “the Zen of Seth.” The Zen aesthetic promotes the use of paradox and contradiction to force the intellect (rationalism) out of the box of five-senses-only perception (empiricism) to include our deep intuitions (mysticism). So Seth sometimes uses contradictory statements to make us think about what he’s really saying “beneath” his words. This is called “subtext” and is an element found in many premodern, perennial wisdom teaching styles.

According to writer Aldous Huxley:

“The subject matter of the Perennial Philosophy is the nature of eternal, spiritual Reality; but the language in which it must be formulated was developed for the purpose of dealing with phenomena in time. That is why, in all these formulations, we find an element of paradox. The nature of Truth-in-Fact [All-That-Is] cannot be described by means of verbal symbols that do not adequately correspond to it. At best it can be hinted at in terms of non sequiturs and contradictions.” (10)

The key paradox at this point in our story is All-That-Is experienced a Primordial Birth Agony as The One became The One-In-Many. In the subjective moment point that All-That-Is conceived a way to release the building tension of Its divine creativity, our physical universe simultaneously manifest in “an explosion of unimaginable proportions, as the divine spark of inspiration exploded into objectivity.” Thus, some kind of Big Bang literally occurred. (We’ll return to these important points later.)

To further understand the paradox of Seth’s “before the beginning” we need to develop our deep intuitions (inner senses) to experience our own remembrance of these events. Seth stated that we all hold the “memories of events with which [our] own inner psyches were intimately involved as the world was formed.” A Zen koan asks, “show me your Original Face before your mother and father were born.” Likewise, do you remember your Original Face “before the beginning?”

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Seth on “In the Beginning”

Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, Vol. 1, session 884, October 03, 1979.

“Once again, in terms of your equations, energy and consciousness and matter are one. And in those terms (the qualifications are necessary) consciousness is the agent that directs the transformation of energy into form and of form into energy. All possible visible or invisible particles that you discover or imagine – meaning hypothesized particles – possess consciousness. They are energized consciousness.

“There are certain characteristics inherent in energy itself, quite aside from any that you ascribe to it, since of course to date you do not consider energy conscious.

“Energy is above all things infinitely creative, innovative, original. Energy is imaginative. (Any scientists who might be reading this book may as well stop here.) I am not assigning human traits to energy. Instead, your human traits are the result of energy’s characteristics – a rather important difference. Space as you think of it is, in your terms, filled with invisible particles. They are the unstated portion of physical reality, the unmanifest medium in which your world exists. In that regard, however, atoms and molecules are stated, though you cannot see them with your [unaided] eye. The smaller particles that make them up become ‘smaller and smaller,’ finally disappearing from the examination of any kind of instrument, and these help bridge the gap between unmanifest and manifest reality.

“For the terms of this discussion of the beginning of [your] world, I will deal with known qualities for now – the atoms and molecules. In the beginning they imagined the myriad of forms that were physically possible. They imagined the numberless cells that could arise from their own cooperative creation. Energy is boundless. It is exuberant. It knows no limits. In those terms, the atoms dreamed the cells into physical being – and from that new threshold of physical activity cellular consciousness dreamed of the myriad organizations that could emerge from this indescribable venture.

“Again, in actuality all of this took place at once, yet the depth of psychological experience contained therein can never be measured, for it involved a kind of value fulfillment with which each consciousness is involved. That characteristic of value fulfillment is perhaps the most important element in the being of All-That-Is, and it is a part of the heritage of all species.

“Value fulfillment itself is most difficult to describe, for it combines the nature of a loving presence – a presence with the innate knowledge of its own divine complexity – with a creative ability of infinite proportions that seeks to bring to fulfillment even the slightest, most distant portion of its own inverted complexity. Translated into simpler terms, each portion of energy is endowed with an inbuilt reach of creativity that seeks to fulfill its own potential in all possible variations – and in such a way that such a development also furthers the creative potentials of each other portion of reality.

“In those terms, then, there was in the beginning an almost unimaginable time in which energized consciousness, using its own creative abilities, its own imagination, experienced with triumphant rambunctiousness, trying out one form after another. In the terms you are used to thinking of, nothing was stable. Consciousness as you think of it turned into matter, and then into pure energy and back again.

“Subjectivity still largely ruled. Like an adolescent leaving home for the first time, individualized consciousness was also somewhat homesick, and returned often to the family homestead – but gradually gained confidence and left finally to form a [universe].

“Now because All-That-Is contains within itself such omnipotent, fertile, divine creative characteristics, all portions of its subjective experience attained dimensions of actuality impossible to describe. The thoughts, for example, of All-That-Is were not simply thoughts as you might have, but multidimensional mental events of superlative nature. Those events soon found that a transformation must occur, if they were to journey into objectivity – for no objectivity of itself could contain the entire reality of subjective events that existed within divine subjectivity. Only in that context could their relative perfection be maintained. Yet they had yearned before the beginning for other experiences, and even for fulfillments of a different nature. They sensed a kind of value fulfillment that required of them the utilization of their own creative abilities. They yearned to create as they had been created, and All-That-Is, in a kind of divine perplexity, nevertheless realized that this had always been its own intent.

“All-That-Is realized that such a separation would also allow you to bring about a different kind of divine art, in which the creators themselves created, and their creations created, bringing into actuality existences that were possible precisely because there would seem to be a difference between the creator and the creations. All-That-Is is, therefore, within each smallest portion of consciousness.

“Yet each smallest portion of consciousness can uniquely create, bring into being, eccentric versions of All-That-Is, that in certain terms All-That-Is, without that separation, could not otherwise create. The loving support, the loving encouragement of the slightest probable consciousness and manifestation – that is the intent of All-That-Is.

“All-That-Is knows that even this purpose is a portion of a larger purpose. In terms of time, the realization of that purpose will emerge with another momentous explosion of subjective inspiration into objectivity, or into another form. In deeper terms, however, that purpose is also known now, and to one extent or another the entire universe dreams of it, as once cellular consciousness dreamed of the organs that it might ‘form.’

“I want to stress that I am speaking here not so much about a kind of spiritual evolution as I am about an expansion. We will for now, however, confine ourselves to a discussion of consciousness in the beginning of the world, stressing that the first basis of physical life was largely subjective, and that the state of dreaming not only helped shape the consciousness of your species, but also in those terms served to provide a steady source of information to man about his physical environment, and served as an inner web of communication among all species.”

Session 886, December 03, 1979.

“Now: In the beginning, there was not God the Father, Allah, Zoroaster, Zeus, or Buddha.

“In the beginning there was instead, once more, a divine psychological gestalt – and by that I mean a being whose reality escapes the definition of the word ‘being,’ since it is the source from which all being emerges. That being exists in a psychological dimension, a spacious present, in which everything that was or is or will be (in your terms) is kept in immediate attention, poised in a divine context that is characterized by such a brilliant concentration that the grandest and the lowliest, the largest and the smallest, are equally held in a multiloving constant focus.

“Your conceptions of beginnings and endings make an explanation of such a situation most difficult, for in your terms the beginning of the [universe] is meaningless – that is, in those terms (underlined) there was no beginning.

“The [universe] is, as I explained, always coming into existence, and each present moment bring[s] its own built-in past along with it. You agree on accepting as fact only a small portion of the large available data that compose any moment individually or globally. You accept only those data that fit in with your ideas of motion in time. As a result, for example, your archeological evidence usually presents a picture quite in keeping with your ideas of history, geological eras, and so forth.

“The conscious mind sees with a spectacular but limited scope. It lacks all peripheral vision. I use the term ‘conscious mind’ as you define it, for you allow it to accept as evidence only those physical data available for the five senses – while the five senses, of course, represent only a relatively flat view of reality, that deals with the most apparent surface.

“The physical senses are the extensions of the inner senses that are, in one way or another, a part of each physical species regardless of its degree. The inner senses provide all species with an inner method of communication. The cells then, possess inner senses.

“Atoms perceive their own positions, their velocities, motions, the nature of their surroundings, the material that they compose. [Your] world did not just come together, mindless atoms forming here and there, elements coalescing from brainless gases – nor was the world, again, created by some distant objectified God who created it part by part as in some cosmic assembly line. With defects built in, mind you, and better models coming every geological season.

“The universe is formed out of what God is.

“The universe is the natural extension of divine creativity and intent, lovingly formed from the inside out – so there was consciousness before there was matter, and not the other way around.

“In certain basic and vital ways, your own consciousness is a portion of that divine gestalt. In the terms of your earthly experience, it is a metaphysical, a scientific, and a creative error to separate matter from consciousness, for consciousness materializes itself as matter in physical life.”

© Robert F. Butts, All Rights Reserved.

Summary of Concepts:

– This is the book where Seth finally bludgeons to death the phrase “in your terms.” But seriously, as Aldous Huxley helped explain in the previous segment, Seth is severely constrained by English’s propensity to cast concepts into linear objects and processes. I never cease to be amazed at the tenacity and consistency in which Seth explains concepts based in spacelessness and timelessness to an audience ensconced in space and time.

Seth opens with a reminder that “in the beginning” of our physical universe E+M=C (energy and matter = Consciousness).

– Physical energy and matter as Consciousness are infinitely creative, innovative, original, and imaginative though our modern sciences do not operate under that assumption. However, Seth does not assign human traits to energy and matter, but instead human traits are made possible by their fundamental characteristics.

– In the beginning, then, physical atoms and molecules dreamt of more complex structures – cells – and explored myriad probabilities in which to best create them. Thus, matter preceded the emergence of simple cellular life, which in turn dreamt of ways to create even more complex biological forms. (Seth skips any mention of the formation of galaxies, solar systems and planets at this point. But key hierarchical relationships exist between the development of energy-matter as atoms, into molecules, and eventually cells that we’ll explore later.)

– In the beginning, value fulfillment guided the experimentation of atoms and molecules. Value fulfillment is an innate quality of Consciousness “that seeks to fulfill its own potential in all possible variations – and in such a way that such a development also furthers the creative potentials of each other portion of reality.”

– In the beginning, Consciousness as atoms and molecules still dreamt about all of the myriad forms they could manifest. But the inner world, the “dreamtime,” was still more familiar. So physical energy and matter were very unstable.

– There is an innate intention and purpose to our young physical universe. However, only so much can be actualized in physical terms in any given time. So there is always a balancing act that nurtures the development of all species as things develop in a cooperative fashion. There will be “another momentous explosion of subjective inspiration into objectivity, or into another form.”

Knowledge of this innate intention and purpose within All-That-Is exists on some level now, since everything exists simultaneously within a “spacious present.” Our entire universe still dreams of it. And Seth hints not so much at some kind of spiritual evolution as some kind of “expansion.” (This may be a reference to the present emergence of postmodern worldviews on a global scale.)

– Again, there is no real beginning in terms of linear time, but a spacious present in which Consciousness experiences nested orders of perception (fields of consciousness) that support and nurture the emergence of our physical universe (Framework 1).

– Our physical senses provide a flat view of reality limited to physical surfaces. However, they are extensions of our inner senses. Thus, every form of energy and matter uses inner senses that work “outside” of space and time (nonlocal). The inner senses are part of a vast inner communication between all species. Our cells also use inner senses.

– Seth closes with a reprise of his opening thoughts that physical energy and matter are Conscious. (This is a good example of what we discussed in the Foreword about Consciousness desperately trying make a comeback in postmodern worldviews and myths.)

Comments:

– In summary, Causal Consciousness exists “before the beginning” of our physical universe. In the beginning, then, the Big Bang was “caused” by the dreaming nature of All-That-Is.

– Seth mentioned that “... In the beginning, there was not God the Father, Allah, Zoroaster, Zeus, or Buddha.” Notice that he invokes recent premodern religious icons that still dominate today. They extend back approximately 3,000 years and superceded earlier Great Mother and Great Goddess figures that reach back tens of thousands of years to the dawn times of humanity.

Various scholars (Campbell, Whyte, Eisler, Wilber, Pagels, etc.) point out how the Judeo-Christian-Islamic father gods managed to repress the feminine Great Goddess principle to such and extent so as to dissociate it. The result was a pathological imbalance in the monotheistic religions that have led to more human suffering in the name of God the Father than anything that preceded it. The expansion that Seth refers to may include the integration of the Great Goddess principle into emerging postmodern myths.

Again, in the Foreword I mentioned that Consciousness is desperately trying to make a comeback in postmodern myths and worldviews. We can now add that the feminine principle, as an element that has been dissociated on a mass scale over the past 3,000 years, is also desperately involved in this postmodern comeback. The feminine principle is further reflected in the use of emotions, intuitions, and first person perspectives – additional qualities repressed in premodern and particularly modern worldviews. Again, we’re exploring a balance and inclusion of both masculine and feminine qualities.

– Finally, over 800 sessions preceded this ambitious attempt at a creation myth. As such, the laws of the inner universe, of which value fulfillment was the first presented, were first published in The Early Sessions: Book Two of the Seth Material (1997). I suspect he chose to focus on value fulfillment for simplicity’s sake and ease of story-telling. Still, we can apply all these innate qualities of All-That-Is to this conscious creation myth. For example, Seth uses consciousness throughout, and hinted at cooperation and energy transformation in this excerpt. He briefly mentions spontaneity later.

• Value Fulfillment
• Energy Transformation
• Spontaneity
• Durability
• Creation
• Consciousness
• Capacity For Infinite Mobility
• Changeability & Transmutation
• Cooperation
• Quality Depth

Though a detailed review is beyond the scope of this essay there is more information available. [Follow this link to Seth’s Laws of the Inner Universe .]

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Seth on “Consciousness Units (CUs), Electromagnetic Energy Units (EEs), and The Sleepwalkers” (pt.1)

Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, Vol. 1, Session 887, December 05, 1979.

“Space, again, is a psychological property. So is time. The universe did not, then, begin at some specified point in time, or at any particular location in space – for it is true to say that all of space and all of time appeared simultaneously, and appear simultaneously.”

Session 889, December 17, 1979.

“I call the building blocks of matter CUs – units of consciousness. They form physical matter as it exists in your understanding and experience. Units of consciousness also form other kinds of matter that you do not perceive.

“CUs can also operate as ‘particles’ or as ‘waves.’ Whichever way they operate, they are aware of their own existences. When CUs operate as particles, in your terms, they build up a continuity in time. They take on the characteristics of particularity. They identify themselves by the establishment of specific boundaries.

“They take certain forms then, when they operate as particles, and experience their reality from ‘the center of’ those forms. They concentrate upon, or focus upon, their unique specifications. They become in your terms individual.

“When CUs operate as waves, however, they do not set up any boundaries about their own self-awareness – and when operating as waves CUs can indeed be in more than one place at one time.”

“... Each ‘particleized’ unit of consciousness contains within it inherently the knowledge of all other such particles – for at other levels, again, the units are operating as waves. Basically the units move faster than light, slowing down, in your terms, to form matter. These units can be considered, again, as entities [particles] or as forces [waves], and they can operate as either. Metaphysically, they can be thought of as the point at which All-That-Is acts to form [your] world – the immediate contact of a never-ending creative inspiration, coming into mental focus, the metamorphosis of certainly divine origin that brings the physical world into existence from the greater reality of divine fact. Scientifically, again, the units can be thought of as building blocks of matter. Ethically, the CUs represent the spectacular foundations of the world in value fulfillment, for each unit of consciousness is related to each other, a part of the other, each participating in the entire gestalt of mortal experience.”

“... In the beginning, then, these units operated both as identities or particles, and as [force fields or] waves. The main concentration was not yet physical in your terms. What you now think of as the dream state was the waking one, for it was still the recognized form of purposeful activity, creativity, and power. The dream state continues to be a connective between the two realities, and as a species you literally learned to walk by first being sleepwalkers. You walked in your sleep. You dreamed your languages. You spoke in your dreams and later wrote down the alphabets – and your knowledge and your intellect have always been fired, sharpened, propelled by the great inner reality from which your minds emerged.”

“... In terms of time, however, we will speak of a beginning, and in that beginning it was early man’s dreams that allowed him to cope with physical reality. The dream world was his original learning ground. In times of drought he would dream of the location of water. In times of famine he would dream of the location of food. That is, his dreaming allowed him to clairvoyantly view the body of land. He would not waste time in the trail-and-error procedures that you now take for granted. In dreams his consciousness operated as a wave [field].

“In those early times all species shared their dreams in a way that is now quite unconscious for your kind, so that in dreams man inquired of the animals also – long before he learned to follow the animal tracks, for example. Where is there food or water? What is the lay of the land? Man explored the planet because his dreams told him that the land was there.”

“... The dream world is not an aimless, nonlogical, unintellectual field of activity. It is only that your own perspective closes out much of its vast reality, for the dreaming intellect can put your computers to shame. I am not, therefore, putting the intellectual capacities in the background – but I am saying that they emerge as you know them because of the dreaming self’s uninterrupted use of the full power of the united intellect and intuitions.”

Session 890, December 19, 1979.

“In the deepest terms, again, your physical world is beginning at each point at which these units of consciousness assert themselves to form physical reality. Otherwise, life would not be ‘handed down’ through the generations. Each unit of consciousness (or CU) intensifies, magnifies its own intent to be – and, you might say, works up from within itself an explosive spark of primal desire that ‘explodes’ into a process that causes physical materialization. It turns into what I have called [an] EE unit, in which case it is embarked upon its own kind of physical experience.

“These EE units also operate as fields, as waves, or as particles, as the units of consciousness do – but in your terms they are closer to physical orientation. Their die is cast, so to speak: They have already begun the special kind of screening process necessary that will bring about physical form. They begin to deal with the kinds of information that will help form your world. There are literally numberless steps taken before EE units combine in their own fashion to form the most microscopic physical particles, and even here the greatest, gentlest sorting-out process takes place as these units disentangle themselves at certain operational levels from their own greater fields of ‘information,’ to specialize in the various elements that will allow for the production of atoms and molecules impeccably suited to your kind of world.

“First, again, you have various stages of, say, pseudomatter, of dream images, that only gradually – in those terms – coalesce and become physically viable, for there are endless varieties of ‘matter’ between the matter that you recognize and the antimatter of physicists’ theories.

“Form exists at many other levels than those you recognize, in other words. Your dream forms are quite as real as your physical ones. They simply fit into their own environment at another level of activity, and they are quite reminiscent of the kinds of forms that you had in the beginning of [your] world.

“While you and all of the other species were what I have called sleepwalkers, your bodies by then were physically capable. In a manner of speaking, you did not know how to use them properly as yet. Now, from a waking state, you do not understand how your dream bodies can seem to fly through the air, defy space and even time, converse with strangers and so forth. In the same way, however, once, you had to learn to deal with gravity, to deal with space and time, to manipulate in a world of objects, to simply breathe, to digest your food, and to perform all of the biological manipulations that now you take for granted.

“You could not afford to identify too completely with such bodies until you learned how to survive within them, so in the dream state the true processes of life began as these new bodies and earth-tuned consciousnesses saw themselves mentally exercising all portions of the body. Behind all that was the brilliant comprehension and cooperation of all of the units of consciousness that go to compose the body, each adding its own information and specific knowledge to the overall bodily organizations, and each involved in the most intricate fields of relationships, for the miracle of the body’s efficiency is the result of relationships that exist among all of its parts, connecting it to other levels of existence that do not physically appear.

“Units of consciousness (CUs), transforming themselves into EE units, formed the environment and all of its inhabitants in the same process, in what you might call a circular manner rather than a serial one. And in those terms, of course, there are only various physical manifestations of consciousness, not a planet and its inhabitants, but an entire gestalt of awareized consciousness. In those terms, each portion of physically oriented consciousness sees reality and experience from its own privileged viewpoint, about which it seems all else revolves, even though this may involve a larger generalized field than your own, or a smaller one.”

“... Man’s dreams have always provided him with a sense of impetus, purpose, meaning, and given him the raw material from which to form his civilizations. The true history of the world is the history of man’s dreams, for they have been responsible in one way or another for all historic developments.”

“... For now in our tale of beginnings, however, we still have a spasmodic universe that appears and disappears – that gradually, in those terms, manifests for longer periods of time. What you really had in the beginning were images without form, slowly adopting form, blinking on and off, then stabilizing into forms that were as yet not completely physical. These then took on all of the characteristics that you now consider formed physical matter.

“As all of this occurred, consciousness took on more and more specific orientations, greater organizations at your end. At the ‘other end,’ it disentangled itself from vaster fields of activity to allow for this specific behavior. All of these units of consciousness, again, operate as entities (or particles, or as waves or forces). In those terms, consciousness formed the experience of time – and not, of course, the other way around.”

© Robert F. Butts, All Rights Reserved.

Summary of Concepts:

– Seth calls the building blocks of matter “consciousness units” or CUs. CUs are a metaphor, symbolic of a deeper subjective Causal Consciousness. They are not things, not separated bits of cosmic dust or quanta, but psychological aspects of All-That-Is used in the creation of any physical form (Jane Roberts also referred to physical matter as “idea constructions”).

– CUs can operate as ‘particles’ or as ‘waves’ similar to quantum particles or waves of light called photons. They are aware of their own existences in either state.

– When CUs operate as particles they build up a continuity in time, take on the characteristics of individuality, establish specific boundaries, and take on the appearance of separate things, like atoms, molecules, galaxies, solar systems, planets, mountains, oceans, cells, animals, people, etc.

– When CUs operate as waves they don’t set up any boundaries about their own self-awareness and can be in more than one place at a time (a no-time, no-space, nonlocal state).

– Every particleized CU contains the inherent knowledge of all other such particles because at other levels CUs are simultaneously operating as waves. This is just another way of explaining how there is no separation, no boundaries within All-That-Is at certain levels, while simultaneously there are boundaries, separation, and dualities. The delicious irony is that All-That-Is needed to discover the means to create boundaries or particles that in turn were imbued with their own propensity for a creativity that was otherwise impossible.

– Scientifically, CUs can be thought of as the building blocks of matter. CUs move faster than light and slow down to form matter. CUs function as entities (particles) or as forces (waves), and they can operate as either or both simultaneously (we can also use them to explain Seth’s concept of simultaneous time, but more on that later).

– Seth employs another metaphor, the electromagnetic energy unit or EEs to describe the process of how groupings of CUs, linked by similar innate intention (remember they’re conscious aspects of All-That-Is), transform themselves and “slow down” to form physical matter. EEs are just larger groupings of CUs as they get earmarked for physical manifestation (for example, quantum scientists have theorized about a faster than light particle called a tachyon).

– Seth also makes an important ethical connection to CUs. Ethically, CUs “represent the spectacular foundations of the world in value fulfillment, for each unit of consciousness is related to each other, a part of the other, each participating in the entire gestalt of mortal experience.” In other words, since there are nested aspects of consciousness that are not separate, but merged as a type of wave form, there are ethical implications inherent within the laws of the inner universe. Value fulfillment, in particular, implies that everything in the physical field is interconnected via the nonlocal properties of energy and matter. Further exploring these relationships can help us discern the natural ethics and morals within All-That-Is. [For more info, see Sethics: the Emergence of Ethics and Morality in the Noosphere]

– In the beginning of the physical field (Framework 1), during the “dreamtime,” CUs operate more often as waves using the dream state as connective tissue between emerging patterns of matter. Our personalities were not primarily focused into physical bodies at that stage, but worked out great creative variations within the dream state. We searched for the best conditions to create a viable ecosystem that would support multiple species of life as guided by value fulfillment.

More importantly, Seth points out that the dream field is the connective tissue between the causal and physical fields. As we will see shortly, this maps onto several important premodern maps of the “Great Chain of Being.”

– Once manifest into physical bodies, early man would be considered sleepwalkers by our present standards. We first learned to walk as a species by sleepwalking, as the dream state was still the “normal” one at this stage. We first dreamed our languages, spoke in our dreams, and later wrote down the alphabets. Everything manifest from inner reality “outward” into the physical, from dream into matter, literally.

– In the beginning during the “dreamtime,” a spasmodic universe blinked in and out, appearing and disappearing, gradually manifesting for longer periods of time. The sleepwalkers likewise blinked in and out, gradually manifesting for longer periods of time, as space and time ItSelf began to stabilize. Again, the dream field was the primary focus of all activity.

In the beginning there were “images without form, slowly adopting form, blinking on and off, then stabilizing into forms that were as yet not completely physical. These then took on all of the characteristics that you now consider formed physical matter.” Thus, the early universe was very unstable as even the basic fields making up matter continued to fluctuate.

Comments:

– In the simplest version of the “Great Chain of Being,” there are three interpenetrated fields: causal, subtle, and physical. We can extend that into more, but for our purposes, we only need the basic three. Thus, in Vajrayana Buddhism we find:

• dharmakaya (causal)
• sambhogakaya (subtle)
• nirmanakaya (physical)

Advaita Hinduism calls them:

• anandamayakosha (causal)
• vijnanamayakosha (subtle)
• manomayakosha (physical)

According to Seth, then, CUs are the foundational active principle – the Primal Cause – used by All-That-Is to consciously create our physical universe. As CUs form EEs, however, there are “numberless steps taken before EE units ... form the most microscopic physical particles.” Seth thus identifies three main, nested actions that simultaneously occur:

1. CUs (causal waves)
2. EEs (subtle waves)
3. Quantum fields (physical particles)

These form the three simultaneous, nested actions and fields of conscious creation. The amazing result is that all particles – now fully individualized consciousness – perceive themSelves to be the center of the universe. As quantum fields, atoms, molecules, or cells they each represent an increasingly complex series of hierarchically unfolding compound constructions (more on the crucial importance of hierarchy later). Still, at this point in our creation myth conditions are not yet right for the emergence of what Seth calls the outer ego. The physical universe is conscious, but not yet Conscious.

Seth’s concepts mirror the above perennial traditions. The paradox is that these three primary actions of conscious creation – causal (wave), subtle (wave), and physical (particle) – occur simultaneously in larger terms via the inner senses, and yet we only perceive the particle aspects through our five senses. However, current leading edge science (e.g., Bohm, Laszlo, Tiller) is just beginning to formulate ways to identify and probe these hidden causal and subtle fields, though shaman, yogis, and adepts have probed them for millennia.

This is also how Seth explains the basic paradox inherent within All-That-Is, which is simultaneously transcendent (waves in the causal and subtle fields) and immanent (particles in the physical field).

Seth uses this particle/wave duality as a key bridge concept between nonphysical and physical fields. It maps onto quantum mechanical concepts like nonlocality (discussed in the Foreword) and the holographic universe (discussed later) among others, but also extends much deeper.

Finally, according to Seth, two of the fundamental actions of CUs are dreaming and inner sensing. Once again, we can more fully understand Seth’s tale by learning to manipulate our own dreams and inner senses.

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Seth on “Consciousness Units (CUs), Electromagnetic Energy Units (EEs), and The Sleepwalkers” (pt.2)

Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, Vol. 1, Session 892, January 02, 1980.

“You were each present at the beginning of the world, then, though you may be present in the world now in a somewhat different fashion.

“Remember that each unit of consciousness is a fragment of All-That-Is, a divine portion. Then perhaps what I am about to explain will make more sense.

“For some time, in your terms, the sleepwalkers remained more or less at that level of [primarily dream-based] activity, and for many centuries they used the surface of the earth as a kind of background for other activity. Their real life was what you would now call the dreaming one. They worked mentally while asleep, constructing in their individual minds and in their joint mental endeavors all of the dazzling images that would later become a mental reservoir from which men could draw. In that multidimensional array, consciousness mentally learned to form itself into EE units, atoms and molecules, electrons and chromosomes. It mentally formed the patterns through which all physical life could flow. The world then came into physical existence. Those units of consciousness are indestructible and vitalized, regardless of the forms they take, and while men’s forms were dream images, consciousness spun forms into physical material.

“Consciousness possesses the most unimaginable agility without ever losing any potency. Those units of consciousness, for example, can mix and combine with others to form a million different sequences of memory and desire, of neural achievement and recognition [of] structure and design.”

“... Initially, then, the world was a dream, and what you think of as waking consciousness was the dreaming consciousness. In that regard the earth’s entire environment was built mentally, atom by conscious atom – each atom, again, being initially formed by units of consciousness. I said that these units could operate as entities [particles], and as forces [waves], so we are not speaking of a mental mechanics but of entities in the true meaning of the word: entities of unimaginable creative and psychic properties, purposeful fragments propelled from the infinite mind as that mind was filled with the inspiration that gave light to the world. Those entities, in your terms so ancient, left fragments of themselves in trance, so to speak, that form the rocks and hills, the mountains, the air and the water, and all of the elements that exist on the face of the earth.

“Those entities are in trance, in those terms, but their potency is not diminished, and there is constant communication among them always.

“There is also constant communication between them and you at other levels than those you recognize, so that there is an unending interplay between each species and its environment.

“There is no place where consciousness stops and the environment begins, or vice verse. Each form of life is created along with each other form – environment and organism in those terms creating each other. After forms were fully physical, however, all species operated as sleepwalkers for many centuries, though on the scale that existed then the passage of time was not considered in the same fashion. During that period the work of wedding nonphysical consciousness to matter was accomplished. Effects of gravity, for example, were stabilized. The seasons took on the rhythms best suited to the creatures in various locations. The environment and the creatures accommodated each other.

“Up until then, the main communications had followed the characteristic patterns of units of consciousness, each unit knowing its relationship to all others upon the planet. Creatures relied upon inner senses while learning to operate the new, highly specific physical ones that pinpointed perception in time and place. This pinpointing of perception was of vital importance, for with the full arousal of consciousness in flesh, intersections with space and time [had to be] impeccable.

“Dream bodies became physical, and through the use of the senses tuned to physical frequencies – frequencies of such power and allure that they would reach all creatures of every kind, from microbe to elephant, holding them together in a cohesive web of space-and-time alignment.

“... This tale, I admit, is far more difficult to understand than a simple story of God’s creation of the world, or its actual production in a meaningless universe through the slippery hand of chance – and yet my story is more magnificent because elements of its truth will find resonance in the minds and hearts of those open enough to listen. For men’s minds themselves are alive with the desire to read properly, and they are aware of their own vast heritage. It is not simply that man has a soul that is somehow blessed while the rest of him is not, but that in those terms everything [he knows], regardless of size or degree, is made of ‘soul stuff.’ Each portion has its own identity and validity – and no portion is ever annihilated or destroyed. The form may change.

“I must of necessity tell this story in serial terms, but the world and all of its creatures actually come together like some spontaneously composed, ever-playing musical composition in which the notes themselves are alive and play themselves, so that the musician and the notes are one and the same, the purpose and the performance being one, with each note played continuing to strike all of its own probable versions, forming all of its own probable compositions while at the same time taking part in all of the themes, melodies, and notes of the other compositions – so that each note, striking, defines itself, and yet also exists by virtue of its position in the composition as a whole.

“The conscious mind cannot handle that kind of multidimensional creativity, yet it can expand into a kind of new recognition when it is carried along, still being itself, by its own theme.

“In a way, your world follows its own theme in creativity’s composition. You want to know where you came into the musical production, so to speak. I use a musical analogy here, if a simple one, to point out that we are also dealing with frequencies of perception. You are tuned into earth’s orchestration [you might say], and your perception of time is simply the result of habits – habits of perception that you had to learn in the beginning of the world. And you learned those habits as your physical senses gradually became more alert and specific.

“You ‘timed’ yourselves – but greater perceptions always appeared in the background of your consciousnesses and in the dream state. It is the great activity of the dream state that allows you, as psychological and physical creatures, to recognize and inhabit the world that you know.”

© Robert F. Butts, All Rights Reserved.

Summary of Concepts:

– We, as early humans and all species in the guise of sleepwalkers, remained focused primarily in the dream state for many centuries as space, time, and matter gradually stabilized. We used the surface of the earth as a background for other intensely creative activity preparing our planet and its ecosystem for our emergence into physical form. We worked mentally while “asleep,” constructing in our individual and collective minds all of the “dazzling images” that would later become a mental reservoir of probabilities from which all species could draw.

– The sleepwalkers left fragments of themSelves as entities “in trance, so to speak, that form the rocks and hills, the mountains, the air and the water, and all of the elements that exist on the face of the earth.” In other words, from within the subtle field, we as energy personality essences literally created every aspect of the physical universe to be our cosmic playground!

– This “Great Chain of Being” (causal–subtle–physical fields) existed in latent or implied form at the beginning of the universe, yearning to be physically manifest. Yet there was a transitional period in which an equilibrium and stasis was achieved that allowed for physical seasons to emerge and an ecosystem to manifest that could support greater numbers of physical species. Again, value fulfillment is one of the laws of the inner universe that constantly fuels the action of conscious creation.

– Seth admits here that he is telling a “tale” and that he is constrained by telling it in serial form. So we are reminded once again that Seth is limited to using symbols, metaphor, analogy, and mythos to describe his creation myth and that all of this is to be taken with a grain of salt. In other words, have fun with it!

– The inner senses are an innate quality within all manifestations of All-That-Is, including CUs and EEs. Thus, inner sensing forms the fundamental “language of translation” – the action of conscious creation – as CUs form EEs which in turn form quantum fields. (Reminder: electromagnetic units = groupings of consciousness units earmarked for physical manifestation.)

However, our physical senses were designed to be so alluring and compelling that we’d use them as our primary form of perception in Framework 1, pushing our inner senses into subconscious neurological background activity. Can anyone say sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll?

– Seth uses the analogy of a cosmic musical composition to further fill in the blanks in his tale thus far, comparing the causal–subtle–physical “Chain of Being” to “frequencies of perception.” In this sense, we gradually learned to tune into earth’s physical orchestration, melodies, and rhythms.

At some point we needed to shift our inner attention into physical forms and allow our sleepwalker selves to fade into a “trance state” so that we could fully experience this new camouflage universe (Framework 1) in its fullness. “We” got so good at this that we have actually hypnotized ourselves into believing that we exist as separate, autonomous creatures. (More on the emergence of the outer ego later.)

Comments:

Seth’s tale shifts to the workings of the subtle field in this segment. As such, the sleepwalkers were “early” inner egos intimately aware of themselves as energy personality essences. The outer egos we are familiar with today were not yet active, but still latent. Thus, they were pre-egoic, immersed in body awareness, needing food, holding basic emotions and sexual instincts, but not yet sentient, or aware of being aware.

The sleepwalkers are our subtle field aspects that learned to manipulate, translate, and form Causal Consciousness into the physical stuff of our universe – EEs into quantum fields, atoms, molecules, DNA, chromosomes, and so on.

Within All-That-Is, then, the sleepwalkers form the subtle field mediating layer between the Causal and physical fields. This is why Seth says that we “were each present at the beginning of the world, then, though [we] may be present in the world now in a somewhat different fashion.” We are really a simultaneous causal/subtle/physical gestalt!

Thus, the action of conscious creation occurs in every moment point through a Causal (wave) field that constantly works in the “background” to fuel a subtle (wave) field (Frameworks ..., 4, 3, 2), which in turn consciously creates our physical universe (Framework 1).

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Seth on “The Ancient Dreamers (The Sleepwalkers)” (pt.1)

Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment, Vol. 1, Session 893, January 07, 1980.

“For what would seem to you to be eons, according to your time scale, men were in the dreaming state far more than they were in the waking one. They slept long hours, as did the animals – awakening, so to speak, to exercise their bodies, obtain sustenance, and, later, to mate. It was indeed a dreamlike world, but a highly charming and vital one, in which dreaming imaginations played rambunctiously with all the probabilities entailed in this new venture: imaging the various forms of language and communication possible, spinning great dream tales of future civilizations replete with their own built-in histories – building, because they were now allied with time, mental edifices that automatically created pasts as well as futures.

“These ancient dreams were shared to some extent by each consciousness that was embarked upon the earthly venture, so that creatures and environment together formed great environmental realities. Valleys and mountains, and their inhabitants, together dreamed themselves into being and coexistence.

“The species – from your viewpoint – lived at a much slower pace in those terms. The blood, for example, did not need to course so quickly through the veins [and arteries], the heart did not need to beat as fast. And in an important fashion the coordination of the creature in its environment did not need to be as precise, since there was an elastic give-and-take of consciousness between the two.

“In ways almost impossible to describe, the ground rules were not as yet firmly established. Gravity itself did not carry its all-pervasive sway, so that the air was more buoyant. Man was aware of its support in a luxurious, intimate fashion. He was aware of himself in a different way, so that, for example, his identification with the self did not stop where his skin stopped: He could follow it outward into the space about his form, and feel it merge with the atmosphere with a primal sense-experience that you have forgotten.

“During this period, incidentally, mental activity of the highest, most original variety was the strongest dream characteristic, and the knowledge [man] gained was imprinted upon the physical brain: what is now completely unconscious activity involving the functions of the body, its relationship with the environment, its balance and temperature, its constant, inner alterations. All of these highly intricate activities were learned and practiced in the dream state as the CUs [consciousness units] translated their inner knowledge through the state of dreaming into physical form.

“Then in your terms man began, with the other species, to waken more fully into the physical world, to develop the exterior senses, to intersect delicately and precisely with space and time. Yet man still sleeps and dreams, and that state is still a firm connective with his own origins, and with the origins of the universe as he knows it as well.

“... In a fashion those ancient dreamers, through their immense creativity, dreamed all of life’s creatures in all of their pasts, presents, and futures – that is, their dreams opened up the doors of space and time to entities that otherwise would not have been released into actualization, even as, for example, the units of consciousness were once released from the mind of All-That-Is.

“All possible entities that can ever be actualized always exist. They [have] always existed and they always will exist. All-That-Is must, by its characteristics, be all that it can ever be, and so there can be no end to existence – and, in those terms, no beginning. But in terms of your world the units of consciousness, acting both as forces [waves] and as psychological entities [particles] of massive power, planted the seeds of your world in a dimension of imaginative power that gave birth to physical form. In your terms those entities [particles] are your ancestors – and yet [they are] not yours alone, but the ancestors of all the consciousnesses that make up your world.”

Session 894, January 09, 1980.

“Basically, there are no real divisions to the self, but for the sake of explanation we must speak of them in those terms. First of all you had the inner self, the creative dreaming self – composed, again, of units of consciousness, awareized energy that forms your identity, and that formed the identities of the earliest earth inhabitants. These inner selves formed their own dream bodies about them, as previously explained, but the dream bodies did not have to have physical reactions. They were free of gravity and space, and of time.

“As the body became physical, however, the inner self formed the body consciousness so that the physical body became more aware of itself, of the environment, and of its relationship within the environment. Before this could happen, though, the body consciousness was taught to become aware of its own inner environment. The body was lovingly formed from EE [electromagnetic energy] units through all the stages to atoms, cells, organs, and so forth. The body’s pattern came from the inner self, as all of the units of consciousness involved in this venture together formed this fabric of environment and creatures, each suited to the other.

“So far in our discussion, then, we have an inner self, dwelling primarily in a mental or psychic dimension, dreaming itself into physical form, and finally forming a body consciousness. To that body consciousness the inner self gives ‘its own body of physical knowledge,’ the vast reservoir of physical achievement that it has triumphantly produced. The body consciousness is not ‘unconscious,’ but for working purposes in your terms, [the body] possesses its own system of consciousness that to some extent, now, is separated from what you think of as your own normal consciousness. The body’s consciousness is hardly to be considered less than your own, or as inferior to that of your inner self, since it represents knowledge from the inner self, and is a part of the inner self’s own consciousness – the part delegated to the body.

“[Each] cell, then, as I have often said, operates so well in time because it is, in those terms, precognitive. It is aware of the position, health, vitality, of all other cells on the face of the planet. It is aware of the position of each grain of sand on the shores of each ocean, and in those terms it forms a portion of the earth’s consciousness.

“... Thus far in our discussion, we still have only an inner self and a body consciousness. As the body consciousness developed itself, perfected its organization, the inner self and the body consciousness together performed a kind of psychological double-entendre.

“... The best analogy I can think of is that up to that time the self was like a psychological rubber band, snapping inward and outward with great force and vitality, but without any kind of rigid-enough psychological framework to maintain a physical stance. The inner self still related to dream reality, while the body’s orientation and the body consciousness attained, as was intended, a great sense of physical adventure, curiosity, speculation, wonder – and so once again the inner self put a portion of its consciousness in a different parcel, so to speak. As once it had formed the body consciousness, now it formed a physically attuned consciousness, a self whose desires and intents would be oriented in a way that, alone, the inner self could not be.

“... [The outer ego] is the self that looks outward. It is the self that you call egotistically aware. The inner self became what I refer to as the inner ego. It looks into that inner reality, that psychic dimension of awareness from which both your own [outer ego] consciousness and your body consciousness emerged.

“You are one self, then, but for operating purposes we will say that you have three parts: the inner self or ego, the body [sub]consciousness, and the [outer ego] consciousness that you know.

“These portions, however, are intimately connected. They are like three different systems of consciousness operating together to form the whole. The divisions – the seeming divisions – are not stationary, but change constantly.

“... To one extent or another, these three systems of consciousness operate in one way or another in all of the species, and in all particles, in the physical universe. In your terms, this means that the proportions of the three systems might vary, but they are always in operation, whether we are speaking of a man or a woman, a rock or a fly, a star or an atom. The inner self represents your prime identity, the self you really are.

“... The body [sub]consciousness is therefore given a superb sense of its own reality, a sureness of identity, a sense of innate safety and security, that allows it to not only function but to grow in the physical world. It is endowed with a sense of boldness, daring, a sense of natural power. It is perfectly formed to fit into its environment – and the environment is perfectly formed to have such creatures.

“The entities, or units of consciousness – those ancient fragments [particles] that burst into objectivity from the vast and infinite psychological realms of All-That-Is – dared all, for they joyfully abandoned themselves in space and time. They created new psychological entities, opened up an area of divine creativity that ‘until then’ had been closed, and therefore to that [degree] extended the experience and immense existence of All-That-Is. For in so abandoning themselves they were not of course abandoned, since they contained within themselves their inherent relationship with All-That-Is. In those terms All-That-Is became physical also, aroused at its divine depth by the thrusting of each grass blade through the soil into the air, aroused by each birth and by each moment of each creature’s existence.

“All-That-Is, therefore, is immersed within your world, present in each hypothetical point, and forms the very fabric from which each portion of matter is created.”

© Robert F. Butts, All Rights Reserved.

Summary of Concepts:

– In the beginning, the world and everything in it – valleys, mountains, oceans, the sky, and every species of organic life – was guided by the cooperative group dreams of every type of consciousness involved. Endless probabilities were explored and a mental framework created that began to include probable pasts, presents, and futures. This stage of development lasted for “eons.”

– Causal Aspects of All-That-Is that Seth calls consciousness units (causal field) translated their inner knowledge via the dream state (subtle field) to create all physical forms (physical field). “... these highly intricate activities were learned and practiced in the dream state.” Thus, the subtle field was a hotbed of creativity that paved the way for the emergence of the physical field.

– Every inner self (including sleepwalkers) has and will always exist in some latent form within All-That-Is. Only a small percentage of this latency can be physically manifest in any given time. All-That-Is strives “to be all that it can ever be, and so there can be no end to existence – and ... no beginning.” Thus, Seth describes the causal (wave) and subtle (wave) fields in terms of eternal qualities (no beginning or end) in relation to the physical (particle) field, which by design has beginnings and endings.

– CUs, acting both as forces (waves) and as individualized consciousness (particles), are the ancestors of every type of consciousness that make