Seth on Worldviews
From The “Unknown” Reality, Vol. 2, Session 718, November 6, 1974.
Now: Ruburt has trained himself to deal with words as a writer. When he picks up a world view that belongs to someone else, he can quite automatically translate it faithfully enough in that idiom of language. Many artists do the same thing, translating inner “models” into paint, lines, and form.
So do scientists and inventors often tune in to the world views of others—living or dead, in your terms—that correlate with their own intents, talents, and purposes.8
These “other,” reinterpreted world views form a matrix from which new creativity emerges. The same thing applies in more mundane endeavors in ordinary life. For example: You may be in a predicament that seems beyond solving. It may be highly individual, since it is yours. It is unique, and has happened in no other way before. No one else has viewed your particular dilemma through your eyes, yet others have been in similar situations, solved the challenges involved, and gone on to greater creativity and fulfillment. If you can momentarily abandon your private world view, that focus from which you experience reality, then you can allow the experience of others who have had similar challenges to color your perception. You can tune in to their solutions and apply them to your particular circumstances. You often do this unconsciously. I do not want you to think, then, that such occurrences work only in esoteric terms.
Many people working with the Ouija board or automatic writing receive messages that seem, or purport, to come from historic personages. Often, however, the material is vastly inferior to that which could have been produced by the person in question during his or her existence. Any comparison with the material received to the written books or accounts already existing would immediately show glaring discrepancies.
Yet in many such instances, the Ouija board operator or the automatic writer is to some extent or another tuning in to a world view, struggling to open roads of perception free enough to perceive an altered version of reality, but not equipped enough through training and temperament, perhaps, to express it.
(Long pause at 11:30.) The most legitimate instances of communication between the living and the dead occur in an intimate personal framework, in which a dead parent makes contact with its offsprings9: or a husband or wife freshly out of physical reality appears to his or her mate. But very seldom do historic personages make contact, except with their own intimate circles.
(Emphatically.) There is great energy, however, in those who have persevered enough to become generally known in their time, and the great impetus of that psychic and mental energy does not cease at death, but continues. In their way others may tune in to that continuing world view; and, picking it up, can be convinced that they are in contact with the physical personality who held it.
Give us a moment . . . You are so used to your own private interpretation of reality that when you allow yourselves to stray from it, you immediately want to interpret your new experience in terms that make sense to your familiar orientation. You are also highly involved with symbols. In ordinary life you often hamper your own creativity. When you use the Ouija board or trance procedures, you frequently free philosophical areas of your mind that have been frozen. The resulting information then definitely seems to come from outside of yourself, and because you are literal‑minded you try to interpret such experiences in a literal way. The material must come from a philosopher, therefore (amused), and since it certainly seems profound to your usual mundane organization, then it appears that such information must originate with a profound mind certainly not your own.
You may signify this to yourself symbolically, so that the board or the automatic writing designates its origin as being Socrates10 or Plato. If you are spiritualistically oriented, the information may come from a famous psychic recently dead. Instead, you yourself have momentarily escaped from your accustomed world view, or home program; you are reaching out into other levels of reality, but still interpreting your experience in old terms. Therefore much of its creativity escapes you.
You are each as valid as Socrates or Plato. Your influences reach through the entire framework of actuality in ways that you do not understand. Socrates and Plato—and William James (note that I smiled)—specialized in certain fashions. You know those individuals as names of people that existed—but in your terms, and in your terms only, those existences represented the flowering aspects of their personalities. (Louder.) They often dwelled nameless upon the face of the earth, as many of you do, in your terms only, now, before reaching what you think of as those summits.
Rob’s Notes:
8. Seth’s information here, that scientists and inventors often tune in to the world views of other such individuals, at once reminded me that a similar long‑term situation could have existed within the Butts family.
In Volume I, see Session 680, with notes 1‑3. My father, Robert Sr., who died in 1971, was very gifted mechanically. According to Seth, a still‑living probable self of Robert Butts, Sr., is “a well‑ known inventor, who never married but used his mechanically creative abilities to the fullest while avoiding emotional commitment.” Although my father’s “sole intent” was the very challenging one of raising a family in this reality, still he may have often exchanged ideas about automobiles, motorcycles, welding torches, cameras, and so forth, with that other inventor‑self.
Do probable selves actually communicate with each other through their world‑view frameworks, then, or can such an interchange of idea or emotion take place more “directly” at times—simply between the probable personalities involved? Either situation can apply, it seems to me, or the two methods may merge at any given “time.” We plan to ask Seth to elaborate.
9. Nine months ago, in February 1974, Seth mentioned the few tentative contacts I’d evidently made with my deceased mother through dreams; see the 683rd session after 11:30, then see my account of one such dream in Note 5 for that session. Two months later, in the 693rd session, Seth described how I reacted (on a cellular, or “unconscious,” level) to communications from my mother as Jane and I considered buying a certain house in my childhood neighborhood in Sayre, Pennsylvania So far, Jane has nothing to report about meetings of any kind with her late mother or father. (All of our parents died between February 1971 and November 1973.)
10. I’d like to dwell a bit upon a point I made in the opening notes for this (718th) session, when I wrote about mediums, or others, contacting the well known dead. I mean it kindly—but Jane and I have never believed that a living individual could be in contact with a famous dead person, especially through the Ouija board or automatic writing. Although we haven’t scoffed at such instances when we heard of them, we’ve certainly regarded those encounters through very skeptical eyes. The gist of our attitudes is that we find it most difficult to believe that “Socrates”—wherever he is and whatever he may be doing, in our terms—is willing to drop everything to give very garbled information to a well-intentioned, really innocent person living in, say, a small town in Virginia. There must be other things he wants to do! Seth’s world view concept, and Jane’s own experiences with it, make the accounts of such happenings much more understandable.
