Seth on knowledge and growth

Sunday, January 7, 2024

Let’s begin with a thought I had early yesterday and did not transcribe from my journal.

9:15 a.m. Well, I have escorted Herbert Hoover to the end of his presidential term, with, as usual, a great deal of sympathy. When I was a young man, I absorbed the liberal and academic party line about Roosevelt, and it took a long time to realize that as usual there was much to be said for the other side of every controversy. It is fascinating now to see so plainly how the personal and the “external” interact unpredictably, so that it appears that little things have large consequences, and small chances produce great detours. It all looks so different now, after decades of reading various conflicting accounts, and absorbing the point of view of so many biographies and being tutored by so many sources: Jung and TGU and Seth not least. “Go, my son, and see with how little wisdom the world is governed.” It’s still the same.

Then came Saturday’s session, transcribed and put onto the blog. This morning, after salivating over the forthcoming reopening of UVA’s Alderman Library tomorrow, I noted that it’s already like the old days (that is, a few years ago!) in that I have a list of books and call letters and am ready to go.

5:30 a.m. For the first time it occurred to me that maybe I had been thinking about [my prospective] “Thoreau and Mr. Emerson” from the wrong end, all these decades. No wonder I couldn’t get anywhere with it. I don’t need to read everything they wrote, or understand Transcendentalism even abstractly, let alone how they understood it. I certainly don’t need to go about it in an academic manner, with apparatus of scholarship I scarcely know how to employ. It should be personal. What they say to me, here, now. What we know and can guess about how they affected each other. Their impact on people like Joseph, factual or not. That could perhaps be accomplished. Swell, one more not-yet-deceased project.

[5:50 a.m.] I was downstairs reading The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, which I am determined to finish this time, and I got a thought about my reading of Seth on the one hand, and history on the other. (Session 818, 2-6-1978.) Seth referred to his “constant state of growth, expansion, and development.” That struck something in me. I remember the guys telling Rita she would never be bored unless she wanted to be, that there is always more to learn. I think this requires an extensive quotation.

[Quotes from between pages 87 and 90:]

“Much of this is difficult to explain, again, for information and knowledge is constantly transformed – almost completely reborn, so to speak, through characteristics that are inherently a part of thought itself. Knowledge is changed automatically through the auspices of each consciousness who perceives it. It is magnified and yet refined. It is a constant language, yet one that transforms itself…. You do not understand or perceive the ways in which your reality contributes to the foundation of the mass-world reality that you experience. Unconsciously, each individual participates in forming that world.”

Really too much to quote but right on point:

• “While our meetings take place in your time, and in the physical space of your house, say, the primary encounter must be a subjective inner one, an interaction of consciousness that is thus physically experienced.”
• “Portions of your consciousness are alive in mine.”
• “You are carried above the land of your usual perception so that portions of you glimpse subjective states.”
• “Your intents and concerns, your interests, your needs and desires, your characteristics and abilities, directly influence our material, for they lead you to it to begin with.”
• “If you can, try to sense this greater context in which you have your being. Your rewards will be astonishing. The emotional realization is what is important, of course, not simply an intellectual acceptances of the idea.”

I perhaps got carried away with the Seth quotations, but the point is that I am realizing that absorbing any branch of knowledge, or absorbing any mixture of first- and second-hand experience, is an active creation, a “doing” that may show no external signs and who cares. Worthwhile and satisfying in itself.