Acharya Peter Wilberg's Bulletin

THE QUESTION OF SETH


Question from Rod:

May this "Seth novice" ask what you have felt is the most confirming or revealing aspect of his writings (via or merged with the Jane awareness)?

My response:

Your question about the SETH contribution to The Awareness Principle and what for me, are the most “confirming” or “revealing” aspects of his writing would require a whole book to answer – yet it also offers me an opportunity to share, albeit in brief, some very important understandings. For one thing, I see the vast body of writings - amounting to more than 40 large published volumes - mostly stemming from Seth but also including many written directly by Jane Roberts through their inspiration - as in many ways comparable in stature and significance to the Kashmiri Shaivist Tantras. For me they also offer important keys to understanding the latter – and vice versa. Without reading and re-reading, studying and re-studying the Seth books for decades, and without learning from Seth’s ground-breaking, articulate and iconoclastic revelations, there simply would be no such thing as ‘The New Yoga’ or ‘The Awareness Principle’ – for these are essentially a unique creative synthesis of the Jnana of the Shaiva tantras and the Gnosis of the Seth books.

This synthesis was made possible by my erstwhile mentor, Michael Kosok. For it was his writings that first brought Andrew Gara and I together, Michael who first introduced me to Seth in 1975, and his philosophy - together with my own initiation into the thinking of Martin Heidegger - that decisively contributed to this synthesis, albeit a synthesis that for me was not only philosophical but experiential from the start, and even before.

This is the reason why I cite Seth in my books, most often in my latest book - Event Horizon – which includes extracts from Seth’s account of ‘creation’ (presented in a book called ‘The Seth Material’) and deals at length with its relation to that of the Shaiva tantras. It is also why I cite Michael Kosok in the first pages of The Awareness Principle, and also cite from Jane Robert’s book entitled ‘The Afterlife Journal of an American Philosopher’ – in particular the description of and from that afterlife by William James (see ‘The Light of Awareness in the Afterlife’ in Tantric Wisdom for Today’s World).

The summary of Seth on the site you refer to an in your mail is absolutely correct in all respects - but nowhere near comprehensive. That is the problem. For despite selling her books in millions (in particular ‘Seth Speaks’) Andrew and I have, for decades, been baffled and appalled by just how little even the most avid and convinced of Seth’s many readers could make of so much – and that so superficially (for the most part concentrating entirely on the single mantram ‘You create your own reality’ and turning it into a parody of simplistic New-Age style ‘positive thinking’). As for what I myself see as the most important aspects of Seth’s writings (or rather his speech – which Jane herself was only able to read through her husband’s transcriptions of it as it came through her in trance) that is another matter entirely - one which, as I say, could fill an entire book. Nevertheless I will seek to make a beginning – both for you, for others (perhaps via the bulletin board) and simply ‘for the record’ as regards the nature and history of my work. What follows then, is a short summary of what I have drawn from Seth:

1. My understanding of the essence of health - as “value fulfilment” – stems from Seth, just as my understanding that illness expresses meanings and not ‘causes’ unites insights drawn principally from both Heidegger and Seth.

2. The understanding that seemingly material ‘things’ are just as much symbols (linga) as words are. In terms of The Awareness Principle they are the living experiential ‘vocabulary’ of awareness, given form through a basic alphabet (matrika) and what Seth describes as inner light and sound – which I understand of course as the inner light and sound of awareness.

3. The fundamental understanding that whilst not a person, God is nothing purely impersonal either. How could he be, Seth asks rhetorically - since that vast consciousness that He is IS itself the source of our personhood, immanent within it.

4. In a section of ‘The Seth Material’ entitled ‘The Agony of All That Is’ he introduces the paradoxical idea that “There is non-being”, yet that this is not a Buddhist void of nothingness (empty even of consciousness) but instead a realm of infinite potentialities - at first dimly sensed in the consciousness of ‘All That Is’ (Seth’s term for ‘God’) and then gradually differentiating and multiplying in his dreams as infinite potential individuals and worlds – all yearning for actualisation. From Seth therefore, I also drew the understanding of ‘non-being’ as merely the non-actual, which does not exclude the reality of all that is potential.

5. Seth does indeed emphasise that we have ‘infinite life experiences’ and that our journey of consciousness is unending. Our infinite lives include not only reincarnational existences (which he for the first time presents as simultaneous incarnations of a common ‘entity’ or ‘oversoul’), but also ‘counterpart’ incarnations living in the same time era, as well as countless parallel lives, lived in parallel worlds. A young physicist brought this idea of parallel worlds to Niels Bohr and was dismissed out of hand. Since then, the idea has been popularised in a number of movies and sci-fi series – recognising that for every decision we take between more than one choice, there is a self that chooses differently. For us that self which chose differently is just a road we could have taken, a life we could have lived. For all our ‘parallel’ selves it is the other way round – ours is the ‘imaginary’ life it could have led, the self it could have become, and/or the world it could have ended up living in.

6. Time is not a line leading from earlier to later, past to future. A tree’s roots do not seek out that ‘earlier’ tree from whose seed it grew, but grow down into the soil from which all trees arise – and grow upwards and outwards towards the light which gives them life and that enables the seed or sapling to become a tree. The physicists have it, according to Seth, exactly the wrong way round and so do philosophers (except Heidegger), psychologists, and historians - including scholars of philosophy and of the tantras. For the fact that light from the outermost edges of the universe takes ‘light years’ to reach us does not mean it gives us a picture of the distant past of the cosmos. Instead the further outward we travel in space - physically ‘or’ in awareness –the more we move towards the future. Just as a sapling roots both down into the soil and towards the very light which enables it to grow into a tree - only thus becoming what it can be - and just as a child grows towards what it could or wants to be in the future – so are all ‘origins’ essentially futural and not ‘rooted’ in the past. The New Yoga is itself rooted in the same soul and soil from which Kashmir Shaivism itself grew, which was not from just its own ‘earlier’ sources but from their soil, and towards what could unfold from that soil and in a light streaming ‘backwards’ from the future.

7. According to Seth, time has an ‘inside’ as well as a before and after. In my terms, it has the character of circles within circles (chakra) or spheres within spheres of a time-space which embraces multiple pasts, presents and futures. All ‘time-lines’ from past to future are but multiple possible lines followed on the surface of a time- sphere. Yet every point or period of time on such a surface line is also linked inwardly to every other through the centre of the time sphere – its Bindu. Ultimately all points and periods in time arise from its withinness and not from earlier or even later points and periods. Thus all Mondays and all 4pms - pictured as petals of a lotus or points on a circle or chakra - are more closely connected with one another than they are with all Sundays or Tuesdays, all 3pms and 5pms – arising as they do from a common inner centre of a time-circle, sphere or ‘lotus’. The ultimate ‘future’ therefore is not the end of any line of time followed on the surface of a time-circle or sphere. For a circle has no beginning or end. Instead the essence of futurity as such is an ultimate circumference, circle or sphere of time-space as such, understood as a circumference of awareness - and its manifestation as the luminous starry centres or ‘galactic gods’ closest to that circumference. Not only is the attempt to determine a point in time at which time itself began – with a ‘Big Bang’ – pure logical nonsense. The very attempt to do so by seeking light from ever-further edges of the known universe gets it the wrong way round. For if we understand time as a sphere of time-space (rather than as ‘lines’ of ‘space-time’) then the ultimate cosmic circumference is when it all ‘began’ (the expanding time-womb of Ma Kali) and not the result of a ‘Big Bang’!

8. Thus it is that whilst I have described The Awareness Principle and its Practice - The New Yoga - as a ‘reincarnation’ of the soul of Kashmir Shaivism, from my neo-Sethian perspective it is more accurate to say that they are that TOWARS WHICH which Kashmir Shaivism itself was growing and striving. The Awareness Principle and The New Yoga are themselves evolving and unfolding in and towards the bright light of a still unforeseeable way of thinking and being, one belonging to a civilisation that is already a reality – not in some long-gone past argued over by archaeologists of the Indus Valley, or fantasised as a long-lost continent of the past - but a possible or ‘probable’ future of humanity. Similarly, what Heidegger called ‘The Last God’, is the ‘earliest’ god only in the essential sense of being that god, which - by virtue of being the ‘fore-runner’ or first to set out – is also the latest or last to fully ARRIVE. Shiva, as the ‘earliest’ god, is in essence this ‘Last God’ – not a past god but that bright sun beckoning us in the present to all our possible futures. Understood in this way, Shaivism and the message of Seth converge in the words of Martin Heidegger for whom the last god is:

“the totally other over and against gods who have been, especially over and against the Christian god … The last is that which not only needs the longest fore-runnership but also itself is … the deepest beginning …not the end but the other beginning of immeasurable possibilities for our history…Preparation for the appearing of the last god is the utmost venture … All heretofore ‘cults’ and ‘churches’ and such things cannot at all become the essential preparation…”

9. For us all as individuals, the future we prepare for is of course…death. Heidegger too, spoke of ‘being towards death’ as the most authentic mode of being. Yet nowhere but in ‘Seth Speaks’ have I read what appears to me as the most accurate account of the death experience, and of the choices and FURTHER paths of development of awareness and being that lies beyond it. What I see Seth ADDING most to both the Shaiva tradition in particular and Hindu/Buddhist philosophy in general then, is a glimpse – in some detail - of the eternal life of the soul after its final incarnation and the larger worlds of awareness it can then explore. For in the multi-dimensional universe of awareness within which Seth describes himself as existing, there are countless planes of awareness, and countless types consciousnesses many of which - unlike his - have never taken physical or human form. Our earthly physical plane then, is no starting point for our development as ‘souls’, nor is it the centre of this multi-dimensional universe of awareness – but merely one minor plane within it. According to Seth it is essentially a type of nursery school in which basic truths, ethical and metaphysical, must be learned before those souls who incarnate within the physical plane and in human form can pass on to the Greater Life of Awareness - embarking on yet greater Journeys of Awareness and fulfilling potentials of awareness impossible to realise within the physical plane. Central to this Greater Life and Journey of Awareness is an expansion of awareness, aided by discarnate teachers, that allows the individualised awareness or ‘soul’ who has left the reincarnational cycle to (a) embrace an ever-greater multiplicity of selves or identities within it, (b) freely mix and merge its identities with those of others (c) explore new planes of awareness and (d) playfully weave and create – like an artist - whole new worlds of awareness.

10. Alternatively, according to Seth the soul may decide to train as a teacher or healer for those still bound to the physical plane. This requires a background experience of many lives in which intimate knowledge of the diverse cultural, social, scientific and religious symbol systems of different eras and civilisations has been acquired – so that these ‘native’ symbol-systems can then be awarefully and artfully deployed as a medium for the communication of truths transcending them – not least the recognition of non-physical realms and dimensions of awareness. Such teachers have always existed, and may operate either from those non-physical realms or through deliberately chosen incarnations as teachers. All the great ‘Mahasiddhas’ and ‘Boddhisatvas’, as well as many great artistic or philosophical geniuses, have trained or served as such teachers – and/or teacher trainers – in this specific sense. Seth himself explains how painters such as Michelangelo used accepted religious symbols in a way that subtly challenged and transcended the framework within which they were understood by the Church at the time. Whole teachings have been presented to humanity by such teachers - either explicitly, as philosophical treatises or tantras, and/or else in the form of art works (for example musical works or literary ‘fiction’ - including ‘science fiction’. To me one of the greatest ‘spiritual teachers’ of the 19th century was not a philosopher or yogin but the composer Anton Bruckner (formally and in his outer personage a devout Catholic). For his symphonies were and are teachings of the most profound character, just as were - and are - the operas of Richard Wagner. And it was Seth’s concept of ‘feeling tone’ – understood in The New Yoga as innate sensual tonalities of Awareness - that was most crucial in helping me to understand and articulate my experience of the awareness-nature of many things – not just music itself, but also of mantra, ‘non-being’ as realm of manifestation-potential, and the experience of ‘tantric pair meditation’. For it was through the innate Siddhis I cultivated and applied through it that I recalled what has always been closest to my heart - the nature of the direct wordless communication of awareness that I had already become accustomed to in the ‘life between lives’. That is also why for me personally, the most important “confirmation” of the Seth books lay in recalling the truth that the ‘afterlife’ is not a mere interlude between physical incarnations nor is leaving the reincarnational cycle a matter of attaining some ultimate state of total identification with the Great Awareness - one lacking all further potential-manifestation or Shakti. Instead what we think as a ‘life between lives or the life ‘beyond transmigration’ is but a PORTAL to The Greater Life and Journey of Awareness’ – a journey that can take us into countless new worlds of awareness, allow us to encounter the higher consciousnesses that inhabit them, offer ever-richer and more intense experiences of awareness and open up ever broader horizons of awareness – up to and including that ultimate circumference or ‘Event Horizon’ of awareness, of which there is nothing higher - Anuttara.

I could go on and on…as I say this is just an introduction to what unaware and untrained ‘Seth fans’ have been wholly unable to grasp from their reading of the Seth books. Suffice it to say that I understand myself as a teacher in the sense described above – and understand this life as the final incarnate stage of my training – a life in which I have succeeded in recalling, mastering and interweaving sufficient symbol-systems - past and present - to forge a new one of the sort so much needed for the future of humanity.

Beyond this life, words will once again cease to be my principal medium of learning and teaching, as they have already long ceased to be in the practice of puja – not to mention the gifts I employ in the new forms of tantric pair meditation I have evolved and their use for healing, teaching and initiation. I look forward to death first of all as an opportunity to engage in fully free and playful Lila – to revel in once again revealing the many currently invisible forms and faces of my awareness body, whilst inwardly communicating with others in the way I love most - through quasi-musical tonalities of awareness and their countless sensual qualities and dimensions. I also know in advance - and from experience already attained in this life - that I will be able, if I choose, to let my awareness flow into the soul bodies of those still physically incarnate, and thus in some way also re-body myself through them without the need of further incarnations myself.

I have shared in this letter some very deep and ‘esoteric’ personal and trans-personal understandings with you in answer to your question about Seth. These in may raise yet further significant questions for other readers. I say to all - feel free to ask them.

And for anyone thinking of embarking on reading Seth himself I recommend that I they start with the book entitled ‘Seth Speaks’ – but ignoring all the unnecessary notes and comments interspersed in it by Robert Butts.

"Shiva has many names." (Rod) Put in other terms the Absolute Awareness - God - 'gods' under many names, and in the form of many higher trans-physical awarenesses. Seth is no doubt one of them - even though one of the first messages he spoke through Jane was that names are not important.


Acharya