What a Long Strange Trip It's Been!
Hello and welcome to my blog. What a long strange trip it’s been! The path that led to my current interest in what I now call Integral Conscious Creation (ICC)
has been one long amazing adventure. What the hell is ICC? Well, it’s a
bit of a story, one that I hope to explore in this blog during the
coming months.
My journey began thirty years ago when I read a book called Seth Speaks
by Jane Roberts. My brother gave it to me while I was home on summer
break from my music studies at Penn State University. Seth Speaks was
the first metaphysical book to really blow my young mind. I had been
into science fiction and fantasy in my teens, and graduated to Carlos
Castañeda and Yogananda by the end of high school. So they helped to
prepare the way, though I did not have any religious education in
conventional terms.
At the time, 1976, I
had a basic sense that there was something mysterious within and
without that religious and scientific worldviews did not adequately
define. Seth Speaks just made intuitive sense in a big
picture, Kosmic sort of way. What was even stranger, this book was
channeled. I had never seen or heard of this phenomenon before, and it
certainly was not a mainstream occurrence at the time. So we’ll be
discussing the channeling phenomenon more closely throughout this blog.
So I bought and read
everything by Jane Roberts for the next four years. Did the practices,
too. Had my first authentic spiritual awakenings as a result, a two and
a half hour sustained out-of-body experience powerful enough to prove
through my direct experience that what Seth and Jane talked about could
be verified, was real, and I was NOT crazy. These books would go on to
color my worldview, and form the foundation of my spiritual journey
that continues to this day.
A core idea in what’s
now called the Seth material is that we each create our own reality.
Turns out that was quite a loaded sentence! It was coined in one of
Jane’s books from the early 1970s – The Nature of Personal Reality
– and became a mantra for the New Age movement. On the positive side,
it put the responsibility of our being where it properly belongs, with
each one of us. Victimhood is downplayed when you begin to believe that
things happen and are created for a reason, even things beyond our
seeming egoic control. It also means that there is purpose and design
to every aspect of our multiverse, or what Seth called All-That-Is.
But this raises a very
important and central issue. Just who is this “you” who creates 100% of
your reality? Along the way, many folks who took Seth literally, and
without any second opinions began to promote the idea that we create
all our reality through the mechanism of thought and beliefs,
principally. If we learn to control our thoughts, then we will control
our beliefs, emotions, feelings, expectations, and our destiny, or
something to that effect. There are many variations.
But the more I
studied, explored, and did the practices the more I began to realize
that I didn’t understand who this “you” who creates 100% really is. Not
by a long shot! It turns out that the majority of New Age spiritual
teachers don’t either. To this day I cannot find any one factor in my
own experience that creates 100% of my reality except for, well,
everything, or All-That-Is. And if anyone tells you anything different,
well, in my opinion they are deeply confused. The problem, however, is
that you are also a part of All-That-Is, yet “you” can’t create my
reality for me. So clearly what I perceive to be my body, mind, and
spirit have something to do with reality creation as well. But then, so
does yours! Co-creation is another topic we’ll explore here, and I see
that Bill Marshall, a fellow blogger on NWV, has posted on this topic a
while back.
All of which is to say
that I do believe that I create 100% of my reality, but I no longer
believe that what Seth calls my outer ego, or what Freud called ego,
creates 100% of my perception. It, I, play an important part, but it,
or the little “I” as I now think of it, is not 100% causal. There’s so
much more going on! Seth also outlines an inner ego, or soul that plays
a very important role in causality or creation. Further, there’s even
deeper layers of All-That-Is he calls primary pyramid gestalts that
play a role too! So we’ll also explore this ontology or type of being
in greater detail in future posts.
Now this is not just
talk. Seth provided various practices – a type of yoga – to explore
this “unknown reality,” as he called it, of All-That-Is through direct
experience. So the idea is not to rely on his, my, or anyone else’s
say-so. The deeper I dug, like an infinite onionskin, the more layers
of Self became known to me. So these days, I like to say that I-I-I
create my reality, to acknowledge these many nested aspects of
All-That-Is present in my (and your!) awareness right now. But enough,
that’s just a preview of what I hope to explore further in this blog.
The final piece of the
ICC puzzle fell together when I discovered the work of Ken Wilber. I
was introduced to Wilber’s work by Norman Friedman, the Seth reader who
authored two books on bridging science and spirit in the 1990s. He was
also a board member of Seth Network Int’l.
I have to admit, the first Wilber book was over my head. The Atman Project
was full of polysyllabic descriptions of his emerging integral theory
that was a bit of a turn off at first. And that’s really the point.
Once I got a good dictionary, and some focus, I gradually began to see
how Wilber’s map of the psyche was similar to Seth and Jane’s. Bit by
bit, I began to assimilate more of Ken’s map, and see how it could be
applied to the Seth material.
Integral means
balanced, comprehensive, and inclusive. What I admired was Ken’s
tireless devotion to bridging science and spirit and his unique way to
doing it. He developed an “integral approach” over thirty years that
maps the five essential elements of human consciousness into a coherent
whole (more on that later). So much so that Seth and Jane’s work can be
plugged right to his “integral matrix.”
Wilber provided me
with a more comprehensive approach this “you” who creates 100% of its
reality. In essence, he provides a set of checks and balances so that
we don’t go too far on the physical, materialist side and reduce all
consciousness to quantum fields. On the other hand, we don’t want to go
too far on the idealist, mental side and reduce all material things to
mental fields or whatever consciousness metaphor du jour. The bottom
line is that consciousness is simultaneously physical and spiritual,
inner and outer, dual and nondual. The ancients knew this, some moderns
too, and we postmoderns are busy rediscovering what the modern
scientismists through out with the mythic religious bathwater, namely,
Causal Spirit exists.
So Integral Conscious Creation
is my attempt to apply Wilber’s integral theory to the Seth material
and related bodies of channeled work. My goal is to better understand
the channeling phenomenon itself, as well as the material that so many
of us explore. I don’t claim to have it all figured out, or have the
final say on this mysterious “You” who creates 100% of Its Reality. But
I do claim to have a more comprehensive, balanced, and inclusive
approach to just what makes this “You” click. I invite you to join me
on this particular adventure in consciousness, and look forward to your
comments!
In the clarity of sweet dreams,
Paul H.
P.S. Jane, I know you’re watching with great interest, too! 
