Library » Integral » What is Integral Conscious Creation?

By Paul M. Helfrich, Ph.D.

“Science is not enough, religion is not enough, art is not enough, politics and economics are not enough, nor is love, nor is duty, nor is action however disinterested, nor, however sublime, is contemplation. Nothing short of everything, will really do.” ~ Aldous Huxley, Island (2002).

What is Integral Conscious Creation?

The phrase “conscious creation” has been used for decades, possibly longer. Applying the term to the Seth Material can be traced to Lynda Dahl, who published three books in the 1990s that used “conscious creation” to mean “you create your own reality.” (1) The latter phrase was coined by Jane Roberts in The Nature of Personal Reality (1974). It went on to become a New Age mantra most recently uttered by Amit Goswami in the New Age hit What the F%#? Do We Know? (2004). So it’s popular in the Seth community to use the phrase “conscious creation,” and sometimes YCYOR (you create your own reality) to represent the core ideas in the Seth material.

This concept has been around for millennia, and is traceable back to the New Thought movement founded by Phineas Quimby (1802-1866) in mid-19th century America. Moreover, it extends all the way back in some form to the Idealist philosophers, from Plato (c.427-c. 347 BCE) to Plotinus (c.205-270 CE) and Nagarjuna (150-250 CE), onwards to Fichte (1762-1814), Hegel (1770-1831), Schelling (1775-1854), Berdyaev (1874-1948), and others. Seen in this light, Jane Roberts’s The Physical Universe as Idea Construction (1963), the manuscript that preceded Seth’s emergence, and the Seth Material that followed are variations of Western idealism. When we compare the Seth Material to premodern and modern forms of idealism we discover three main similarities:

1. Universe As Multiverse: All-That-Is as nested fields of physical, subtle, and causal consciousness (exteriors).
2. Self As Multidimensional: All-That-Is as nested Aspects: I-I-I (interiors). (2)
3. Involution/Evolution: All-That-Is as Primal Cause and Effect (causality).

Therefore, conscious creation can’t be limited to only the Seth material, because the basic epistemology of concept 1 above and ontology of concept 2 above are found in some variation in all premodern and modern traditions.

1. The way that we create 100% of our reality in physical, subtle, and causal fields includes some variation of:

• (Eye of Flesh) - Physical senses/emotions.
• (Eye of Mind) - Mental/rational intelligences.
• (Eye of Spirit) - Inner senses.

2. The entire “You” who creates 100% of its own reality includes some variation of:

• (I) - Outer ego in the physical field.
• (I) - Inner ego in the subtle field.
• (I) - Pyramid Gestalts/Causal Consciousness in the causal field.

3. Involution/evolution describes the simultaneous action of creation in nonphysical and physical fields. Involution describes how All-That-Is acts as Primal Cause to create causal, subtle, and physical fields. For example, Seth used consciousness units (causal CUs) and electromagnetic energy units (subtle EEs) in this way in Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment (1986). (3) Sri Aurobindo (1872-1950) used the Hindu Vedantic version of involution in The Life Divine (1949). Involution also helps explain pre-birth choices like intent, gender, who our parents will be, etc., that are not made by the outer ego.

Thus, “conscious creation” more accurately applies to any modern or postmodern body of work that explores the simultaneous action of involution/evolution in physical, subtle, and causal fields via physical, mental, and spiritual senses.

Modern examples of conscious creation include Vedanta Hinduism and Vajrayana Buddhism. Postmodern examples include the information offered by Seth, Elias, Kris, Rose, Wilber, and others.

However, while the premodern traditions had an understanding of involution – the action of Consciousness as Primal Cause – what’s missing is an understanding of evolution: Consciousness unfolding in broad stages of increasing complexity over time in the physical field, or what Seth called Framework 1. We’re not talking about the crude distortions of Social Darwinism used by Robber Barons or Nazi Germany to justify economic inequalities or genocide, but the kind of evolutionary theories found in Fichte, Hegel, Schelling, Teilhard de Chardin (1881-1955), Radhakrishnan (1888-1975), Gopi Krishna (1903-1984), Wilber, and others. These modern and postmodern thinkers all show the driving “Force” behind evolution – natural selection, genetic mutations, etc. – to be none other than Consciousness, not chance, chaos, or randomness.

Unfortunately, premodern forms of idealism have tended to demean the physical. Since they correctly intuit that Consciousness is Primal Cause, and not material quantum fields, idealists tend to reduce everything to Consciousness, which is no-thing and immaterial. This has led to extreme asceticism, denial of the flesh, and other “sinful self” ideologies that marginalize the physical as secondary. On the other hand, modern materialist science claims that everything is reducible to quantum fields, and consciousness is a mere after-effect or epiphenomenon of matter. This has led to alienation, fragmentation, and dissociation from Causal Consciousness that marginalizes consciousness as secondary. The two “value spheres” have been at odds for the past five centuries, and have yet to find a viable middle ground.

Therefore, part of what defines postmodernism are attempts to find that middle ground – ways to more adequately situate inner and outer, the ideal and material aspects of reality. Give each its place and don’t reduce one to the other, situate the physical and nonphysical as nested, interpenetrated fields within All-That-Is. Postmodernism attempts to bring Consciousness, which was present in premodern worldviews, back into the picture while acknowledging the advances and limits of modern science. However, this requires a type of cognitive development that can situate multiple contexts, some even contradictory, as all true but partial pieces of a larger puzzle. When taken together, we begin to hone in on more true and less partial explanations. It also requires a paradigm which can disclose and enact data through the use of physical senses, reason, and inner senses. Ken Wilber’s integral approach did just that in Sex, Ecology, and Spirituality: The Spirit of Evolution (1995). (4)

Thus, when we combine Wilber’s integral approach with the above definition of conscious creation, we get Integral Conscious Creation (ICC). Integral simply means balanced, inclusive, and comprehensive. It doesn’t attempt to reduce inner to outer, or vice versa, but properly situates all dimensions of being in the world. We can have Causal Consciousness and quantum fields jointly creating and co-creating. Though integral theory has a lot of bugs to be worked out, it is the first viable postmodern theory of consciousness that doesn’t reduce all reality to the random, meaningless effects of quantum fields. The integral approach allows us to more adequately explore the physical, subtle, and causal fields of consciousness and the action of involution/evolution. No small feat! As such, it helps us further understand the riches in the Seth material in relation to other premodern, modern, and postmodern transformative traditions. (5)

In short, Integral Conscious Creation applies the checks and balances of an Integral Approach to any conscious creation source to help mine its many gems.

The results:

• Promote multiple perspectives yet make no claim to have the final say or one true interpretation.
• Include exercises and other practical applications that promote personal transformation.
• Provide a thorough overview of the core ideas.
• Outline a scalable methodology that anyone can use to mine new insights from existing and emerging knowledge domains.
• Help demystify the channeling phenomenon – one of the thorniest issues for the mainstream to come to terms with the Seth, Elias, and Kris Material.
• Show how all the above fits into a wider organizing principle – emerging postmodern worldviews – that affects all people globally, and doesn’t unduly privilege genders, races, or special interest groups.
• Is done in a way that doesn’t reek of scientism, New Age/Religious woo-woo, Sethism, Eliasism, or Krisism.

Integral Conscious Creation is part of an emerging postmodern worldview that reflects the following values:

• We create our own realities, individually and en masse, thus we each create our own worldviews.
• We exist in a time of accelerated growth and change, a transition from premodern and modern toward postmodern worldviews, that points toward a global evolutionary shift in consciousness.
• Integral Conscious Creation is not to be taken as true based on faith, belief, or authority, but through direct personal experience. Thus, the validity of these concepts must ultimately be verified or falsified by each of us through internal experience, not external mandates. Any truths not open to falsification are simply dogma in disguise.
• Postmodern worldviews are not fixed, and will in turn be replaced by even more complex worldviews. They are the result of ongoing involutionary and evolutionary processes. They are pluralistic, relativistic, and worldcentric. As such, they honor all races, genders, and creeds. Therefore, no single person, group, family, corporation, government, religion, or ideology can own proprietary rights to Universal Truth or can claim to be an infallible source of knowledge.
• Our physical universe and its evolutionary constructs – physical, biological, and mental – consist of conscious perspectives. They are interpenetrated in a wondrous Great Nest of Being that includes subtle and causal fields of consciousness. Other terms for this Nest are All-That-Is and Kosmos.
• The human body/mind and its relationship to Causal Consciousness is more fully explained by Transpersonal, Integral, and Aspect Psychologies. For example, the multidimensional “You” who creates all its reality is simultaneously nested within physical, subtle, and causal fields of consciousness.
• While Causal Consciousness creates all expressions of matter, the two work hand in hand. Linear space-time is a wondrous mental and neurological construction in the physical field.
• All species within the physical field are created by the action of evolution and involution in the subtle and causal fields. Thus, the modern idea of evolution from lower to higher life forms through natural selection and “selfish genes” does not fully explain how biological life evolved from quantum fields nor how humans evolved from biological life. Further, it does not explain the Primal Cause that existed “before the beginning” of The Big Bang. Integral Conscious Creation does.
• There are innate natural laws within the causal field that guide the action of involution and evolution. For example, value fulfillment is an innate quality of Consciousness that seeks to fulfill its own potential in all possible variations in such a way that furthers the creative potentials of every other aspect of All-That-Is.
• Understanding the differences between our socially constructed belief systems in relation to natural law is critical. Natural laws, like value fulfillment, are Universal Truths that apply to All-That-Is, thus they function simultaneously within the physical, subtle, and causal fields. As such, morality and ethics in the physical field – conventional notions of good and bad, right and wrong, health and pathology – are cultural, regional belief systems based upon our collective intuition of Universal Truths, but not in themselves Universal Truths since belief systems don’t exist in subtle and causal fields. Confusing beliefs as Universal Truths has limited our collective value fulfillment for centuries.
• There is an innate moral intuition in humans based upon natural grace, compassion, guilt, and violation that apply across a developmental spectrum from preconventional (me) to conventional (us) to postconventional (all of us) and wider (all sentient beings). Each moral stage embraces increasing depths of care, concern, and compassion. Thus, there is a spectrum of moral values not a fixed set etched in stone. When we confuse preconventional with postconventional, the results are often disastrous; for instance, elevating terrorism to high spiritual realization, or reducing all transpersonal experience to infantile dissociation.
• We each have direct access to Causal Consciousness through our inner self. There is no outside middle-man required. Therefore, it is crucial to discern the utility of inner, subjective messages from our muses, spirits, entities, and other aspects within subtle and causal fields of consciousness. All interpretations are filtered through preconventional (me), conventional (us), postconventional (all of us), and wider (all sentient beings) worldviews. Again, to confuse preconventional with postconventional often produces disastrous results, for example, elevating childhood experiences of nondual unity to sainthood, or reducing adult experiences of nondual unity to a psychotic break.
• Individuals who master high intellect – physical senses, reason, and inner senses – are needed to further develop our sciences, arts, humanities, theology, and mysticism into postmodern forms. Closing the epistemological gap – ways of knowing what is True and accepted as evidence of the True – between all disciplines, especially science and religion, is crucial for collective value fulfillment.
• Science and religion don’t now, and may never, provide all the answers to the fundamental questions of God, life, the universe, and everything. For example: Why are we here? What is my purpose in life? Where are we “before” birth and “after” death? Etc. Therefore, the answers to these questions must ultimately be verified or falsified by each of us through direct, internal experience, not external mandates based solely on faith.
• Our waking experience in the physical field emerges from the dream state in the subtle field of consciousness. In this light, the action of dreaming isn’t unreal or “less than,” but is the foundation that supports the waking state. As such, it forms an emerging frontier of important research and practical application.
• Impulses are an innate inner language designed to lead us to our own deepest value fulfillment. However, they can be repressed, dissociated, or blocked on individual and collective levels. These repressions, dissociations, and blockages can have disastrous results. For instance, addictive, violent, and abusive behavior on individual and collective scales.
• Cooperation is stressed over competitive modes of collective behavior, though both are necessary. This will have a crucial impact on collective value fulfillment in terms of educational, economic, political, scientific, and spiritual institutions that affect over six billion people.

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How Does Integral Conscious Creation Compare to Creationism?

Integral Conscious Creation has little to do with Creationism or its more sophisticated formulation Intelligent Design. Integral Conscious Creation is postmodern, Creationism is premodern. Both contain the gem that Causal Consciousness created our universe. However, the similarities end there as the literal interpretation of Genesis and Christian dogma of the virgin birth, Satan as root of all Evil, and salvation in the resurrected Christ – ideals promoted by Intelligent Design’s leading proponent William Dembski – are premodern fairy tales contradicted by Seth and shredded by modern and postmodern sciences.

Phillip E. Johnson, a lawyer, coined the phrase “intelligent design” in 1991 to mean that biological life was created by an intelligent but unidentified designer. “Biochemist Michael Behe devised the argument of ‘irreducible complexity’ (IC) to which theologian William Dembski added his doctrine of ‘specified complexity’ (SC) as a supporting element. IC is, however, by far the most frequently cited of the two hypotheses.” (6)

Thus, Intelligent Design theory is a more sophisticated guise that premodern Creationism has taken recently. It offers some valid and not so valid critiques of modern Darwinism. That’s all well and good, but its covert political agenda is clearly regressive, seeking to elevate premodern fairy tales to modern scientific credibility. For example, in his book Intelligent Design; the Bridge Between Science and Theology (1999), Dembski states that “the conceptual soundings of the [intelligent design] theory can in the end only be located in Christ.” (7)

Again, Integral Conscious Creation, as I define it, shares the important premodern gem of Causal Consciousness and any valid modern scientific critiques but rejects the premodern exoteric dogma. Intelligent Design has been rejected, predictably, by mainstream science; the National Academy of Sciences calls ID a pseudoscience. It may serve as a bridge to bring Causal Consciousness back into the equation, but as long as it gets hijacked by fundamentalist agendas it will remain mired in premodern inaccuracies and distortions.

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What About Creation Spirituality and Christianity?

Matthew Fox, an Episcopalian theologian, coined the term Creation Spirituality. A postmodern attempt to rehabilitate the original gnostic ideals in Christianity, it still hangs onto an odd mix of premodern Christian dogma. It contains the same gem of Causal Consciousness and refutes the sinful self with what he calls the “original blessing.” His interpretations earned him the official censure of the Vatican in 1989, and forced his dismissal from the Dominican Order in 1993. Like Creationism, Creation Spirituality and Integral Conscious Creation share the premodern notion of Causal Consciousness, and perhaps a few more things, but in general have significant differences. To Fox’s credit, Creation Spirituality may well evolve into a translative postmodern religion, but it is not clear how it claims to integrate the advances of modern science, something at the heart of Integral Conscious Creation as I define it.

So what does Christianity have to do with Integral Conscious Creation? Jane Roberts was raised Roman Catholic, but rejected exoteric Christianity outright in her adult life. Her work doesn’t seek to rehabilitate institutionalized Christianity, but instead to move beyond worn out Christian mythos and pave the way for whatever comes next in postmodern terms. In particular, see The Further Education of Oversoul Seven (1979) where Christ is put into a retirement home along with Zeus and other gods whose time has passed. There is also a significant amount of so-called Christ material in various Jane Roberts books, including Seth Speaks, that provide Seth and Jane’s critiques on historical Christianity. For instance, Seth claimed that Christ was never actually crucified, but would reincarnate anonymously to participate in a global spiritual reformation completed by 2,075.

While the Seth material was produced in the cultural milieu of Christianity, it is at the very least an attempt to cast the transformative elements of Christianity, and all the great premodern religions, into postmodern exoteric clothing. For example, the idea of the sinful self, or self flawed by Original Sin is refuted; the inner senses, or means of direct experience of Causal Consciousness is mandated; Consciousness is seen as in the world (immanent) but simultaneously not of it (transcendent); and the need for institutional spiritual middle-folk is rejected. In this sense, it could be the precursor of an authentic postmodern religion.

By precursor I mean that, along with other channeled sources like Elias (Mary Ennis) and Kris (Serge Grandbois), it represents a clear trend that transformative teachings continue to bubble up from grass root sources. All authentic religions emerged when the collective went through major transformations in consciousness. According to Jean Gebser in The Ever-Present Origin (1985), we have evolved through premodern archaic, magic, mythic, and modern rational religions and worldviews to date. Gebser and others say that we are currently in the midst of a transition from modern to postmodern religions and worldviews.

Further, and more importantly, the Seth material may be a stepping stone toward a post-postmodern science. For example, Seth outlined something he called dream-art science, a discipline that uses the high intellect to produce and interpret scientific data. This part of the Seth material may foreshadow the emergence of an art-science hybrid that bridges modern science and premodern religion.

Ironically, the Seth material runs into the same problem facing all the transformative traditions, namely, that they must have some kind of exoteric form to perpetuate and promote the teachings. That requires some kind of organization, and thus far there have been various grass roots efforts to keep the Seth material afloat, the books in publication, and promote affinity groups. For instance, several ESP class students continue to write and teach informally. Notably Susan Watkins continues to publish Seth-related books, and Rick Stack is one of the main publishers of Jane Roberts’s work.

Several groups hold annual Seth-related conferences and seminars. Helen Walker founded the Rocky Mountain Seth Conferences in the 1980s, and Jim and Carol Funk continue with The Colorado Seth Conferences in 2005. Earlier, a nonprofit called the Austin Seth Center was formed by Maude Cardwell in the 1980s. In 1992, due to her failing health, Lynda Dahl and Stan Ulkowski took over and created Seth Network International, which ran until 1999, when Stan passed away. However, its online discussion forum – Sethnet – continues to this day run by yours truly, and a handful of volunteer moderators. Lynda and Stan, along with Michael Steffen, Mary Rouen, Paul and Joanne Helfrich, founded NewWorldView.com and held conferences and author seminars during 2001 before limiting their efforts to web articles and discussion forums in 2002. Though the Internet has promoted various online groups, and the Seth material has found a permanent home in the Yale Sterling Archives in New Haven, CT, it remains a grass roots effort in 2005.

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Endnotes:

(1) Beyond the Winning Streak: Using Conscious Creation to Consistently Win at Life (1993), Ten Thousand Whispers: A Guide to Conscious Creation (1995), The Wizards of Consciousness: Making the Imponderable Practical (1997).

(2) More importantly, this ontological distinction prevents the reduction of the “You” who creates all its reality to only the outer ego (physical field) which creates solely through thoughts – a common distortion found in many New Age interpretations of conscious creation. Since I define the “you” in “you create your own reality” as existing in simultaneous physical, subtle, and causal fields I sometimes use the term “I-I-I” to represent this ontology. Thus, to say, “I-I-I create my reality” more accurately reflects this.

For more details, see Who is the “You” in You Create Your Own Reality?

(3) In the first five chapters, Seth used CUs and EEs to explain how involution preceded the Big Bang in what he calls “before the beginning.” CUs are the causal “force” of All-That-Is within the causal field that formed the subtle field, EEs are the causal “force” within the subtle field that formed the physical field, and quantum fields are the form taken by CUs and EEs in what Seth calls Framework 1. Thus, All-That-Is creates all Its reality simultaneously through interpenetrated causal, subtle, and physical fields via CUs/EEs/quantum fields. These three nested fields are accessible through waking, dreaming, and deep dreamless states, because CUs dream and have inner senses.

Further, as evolution proceeded after the Big Bang, Seth is clear that there is an order of play which maps to Teilhard de Chardin’s three basic stages of physical (geosphere), biological (biosphere), and self-reflexive mental (noosphere) outlined in The Phenomenon of Man (1959). Also, the noosphere evolved, generally speaking, to include premodern, modern, and emergent postmodern worldviews.

For more details, see Seth on “The Origins of the Universe and of the Species” – An Integral Conscious Creation Myth.

(4) Wilber defined a postmodern theory of consciousness that integrated five basic capacities in our awareness right now: nested perspectives (I, We, It, Its), nested physical/subtle/causal fields, multiple intelligences, waking/dreaming/deep sleep states, and types (gender, Myers-Briggs, enneagram, etc.). These form the basis for an integral methodology which is still under development at the Integral Institute in Boulder, CO.

Wilber’s integral methodological pluralism (IMP) is outlined in Excerpt D: The Look of a Feeling: The Importance of Post/Structuralism. Essentially, it identifies eight major perspectives that complement each other. Thus, each perspective is true, but partial, and discloses something important about All-That-Is but cannot in any way claim to be the exclusive and only way to know Truth. The principles of nonexclusion, enactment, and enfoldment provide checks and balances to ensure that these eight perspectives do not claim to provide “the correct view” of reality and therefore “cannot be used ... to negate, criticize, or exclude other experiences brought forth by other paradigms.”

Moreover, there will never be an airtight case to logically prove the existence of Causal Consciousness. Since modern science reduces all ways of knowing (epistemology) to the five senses and logic, and Causal Consciousness is translogical, it requires a paradigm that includes adequate use of what Seth calls the high intellect, Ken Wilber calls epistemological pluralism, and I call hyperception. Thus, Integral Conscious Creation uses the physical senses (eye of flesh), reason (eye of mind), and inner senses (eye of spirit) to know what is true.

(5) For more details, see Integral Conscious Creation: Rocket Science for the Soul.

(6) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Dembski.

(7) p. 210. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Dembski.

© 2005 Paul M. Helfrich, All Rights Reserved.

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