LIFE CLOUDS

And a very positive event took place that afternoon. Jane received from Prentice-Hall the first copies of her book of poetry: If We Live Again: Or, Public Magic and Private Love. We had looked forward to seeing that handsome little volume ever since she first conceived of it well over two years ago, before she had a title.⁴ If possible, Jane was even more pleased at the publication of If We Live Again than she had been when her book of poetic narrative, Dialogues of the Soul and Mortal Self in Time, came out in 1975. If We Live Again once more carried her back to her earliest days of creative work, which in turn had led to her teenage dreams of becoming a published poet [she was born in 1929]. As I’ve shown in various notes in the Seth books, through the art of her first love, poetry, Jane presents her beliefs with an amazingly simple clarity, combining her mystical innocence and knowledge with her literal-minded acceptance of physical life.

Dictation. We will begin a new chapter (12), entitled: “Life Clouds.”

Understand, however, that the term “dream cloud” would serve as well. [Yet] it is an evocative reference to the way that All That Is packaged itself in the formation of its numberless realities. Such life clouds “still” exist—and you had better put the word “still” in quotations. Each seed of life, of living, contains within itself its own protective coating, its own placenta of necessary nourishment and environmental circumstances, its own system and branches of probabilities.

Those branches of probabilities act like remote sensors, seeking out those conditions that will be suited to the seed’s best value fulfillment and development. In the simplest of terms, the life clouds will send forth their contents (pause) where circumstances best meet their own requirements. On the other hand, the life clouds can seed their own worlds completely. Space itself already speaks of a creation “begun,” for no matter how empty space may seem to be it simply appears like a vast cathedral, or tent or pyramid of form, for the moment perhaps vacant inside, with walls so distant that they go unperceived.

Your own entire structure of life, therefore, with its acute and precise definitions in the package of reality, is a living life cloud that may or may not be perceived in other realities. That cloud contains within it ever-freshening sources of new creativity. When you dream or sleep or think, you automatically add to other dimensions of a life cloud or dream cloud that emerge from the very actions of your own subjective motions.

Some of this evening’s material will only have meaning to you in the dream state, for that matter, and the words of the book may stir some of those meanings into your attention. Each portion of all such life clouds seeks value fulfillment, again, but that term itself is woefully inadequate to express the nature of life’s diversity, purpose, or meaning.¹⁵

(10:28.) This purpose or meaning does not exist apart from your own existence, however. You are a part of life’s meaning and purpose—but those purposes, “coming from” (long pause), coming from the source of your own being, are too great to be expressed or described within the structure of your personhood as you understand it. Such understanding is often experienced or sensed, however, sometimes as you are listening to music or when you are deeply stirred by emotion, and when you do not place a great distance between it and yourself.

Attending to the life that you have with love, beginning “where you are,” will best allow you such a feeling for your own meaning.

What do I mean by such attention? Attention to the moment as it is presented. Attention to the table of rich reality as it appears before you. Attention to the kind of person you are, and to the loving appreciation of your own uniqueness. To attend to your life in such a fashion brings you into a clearer communication with the inner action of your own existence.

I explained that lately I’ve been thinking about what can happen when a person chooses to be born with very strong gifts, but then discovers that for whatever reason or reasons he or she cannot use them, or has to pay a high price to do so. At first I thought it contradictory that such conflicts can arise within nature’s framework—then I realized that they must happen all of the time, and so, actually, are natural after all. I used to think that nothing could keep an individual from showing a great ability. Now, I told Jane, I realize that things are far from being that simple. The use or nonuse of an attribute can have as many ramifications as there are human beings who possess whatever version of it: ranging all the way from being completely buried in a life, to being simply left alone, used just “as is,” or thoroughly transformed in expression.

(Very long pause beginning at 9:59.) “I would never stand in the way, however, of Ruburt’s recovery as you understand it. Nor would I feel that Ruburt has let me down, or that you had in any way. Ruburt does need a return to an earlier orientation. That sense of beauty, that reorientation, can relieve the feeling of responsibility that he has at times taken upon himself. He needs an orientation toward the simpler issues—those that carry within themselves a simpler childlike magic. He needs to turn away from an overconcern with life’s more ‘weighty problems,’ to lose the feeling that it is up to him to solve those problems for himself and you and for the world.

3. After the personal session of December 1 (see Note 1), I’d suggested to Jane that we initiate a daily program of reading and discussing Seth’s material. In keeping with that idea, two nights later Seth recommended that we begin studying the sessions on the magical approach to life and on the sinful self. Then he commented in general on the cyclic and beneficial nature of such undertakings:

“Another point: Regardless of any seeming contradictions, the beneficial aspects of any particular creative activity far outweigh any disadvantages. The nature of creativity, regardless of any given specific manifestation, is reflected in an overall generalized fashion that automatically increases the quality of life, and such benefits are definite regardless of what other conditions also become apparent. I mean to make clear here that regardless of any complications that may seem only too apparent to you, in the production and distribution of my last book, and Ruburt’s (Mass Events), the benefits far outweigh any disadvantages.

(Seth, starting at 8:49 P.M.:) “Ruburt is truly beginning to understand that the magical approach is indeed the natural approach to life’s experience.

(Long pause at 9:03.) “You do not have to worry in an overly strained way about putting the new principles of life into practical experience at once. You do not need to worry or deride yourselves for stupidity if it appears (very long pause, eyes closed), looking over the long annals of work that we have done together, that it should have been obvious that our ideas were leading in certain directions—for not only have I been trying to divest you of official ideas, but to prepare you for the acceptance of a new version of reality: a version that could be described in many fashions. It has been during the annals of history, but many of those fashions also indisputably, and with the best of intentions, managed to give a faulty picture: You ended up with your gods and demons, unwieldy methods and cults, and often with the intellect downgraded. I hope, of course, that our ‘model’ avoids many of those pitfalls.

“Some mountain climbers, when asked why they climb a certain peak, respond: ‘Because the mountain is there to be climbed’—so the natural approach, the magical approach, is to be used because it exists, and because it represents an open doorway into a world of reality that is always present, always at the base of your cultures and experience. Theoretically at least, the magical approach should be used because it represents the most harmonious method of life (underlined). It is a way of living that automatically enhances all of your abilities and accelerates your comprehensions.

(9:24.) “You should understand that the approach is the best one to use in life, generally speaking, but it will improve all conditions, even if you still have difficulties in certain areas, and its use cannot help but promote the overall quality of your lives. That recognition takes the pressure off, so that you can to some extent relax your old attitudes enough so that you allow the magical approach (long pause) to work in those areas that have been bones of contention.

“In a manner of speaking, Ruburt’s physical condition represents the bruises, the wounds inflicted upon any individual in his or her long journey (long pause) toward a greater comprehension of life’s experience. In religious terms, you begin to glimpse a promised land—a ‘land’ of psyche and reality that represents unimpeded nature (again, all very intently).

“The universe is not dependent upon your belief in it in order that it can exist. It contains within itself its own comprehension of its own knowledge, its own magical recognition of itself, its own harmonious laws and orders, its own cabinetry. It possesses and holds intact even the smallest probability, so that no briefest possible life or creature or being is ever lost in the shuffle of a cosmic mechanics.

10. Jane had responded beautifully to my suggestion when she began dictating Seth’s The Nature of the Psyche: I’d playfully told her at suppertime that she was going to start a new Seth book in the session which was due that evening—and three hours later she did just that. Although she was writing her own Psychic Politics while I worked on the notes for “Unknown” Reality, she was between Seth books, and I wanted her to have one in progress so that it “could underlie her daily life like a foundation.” See the opening notes for the first session in Psyche—the 752nd for Monday evening, July 28, 1975. We held that session four months after moving into the hill house.

14. When Seth quoted me as referring to a “life cloud,” he went back to the discussion Jane and I had at lunch today, concerning recent news reports and articles: Some prominent astrophysicists, mathematicians, and astronomers have announced their belief in a theory of “panspermia”—that in ordinary terms of time life on earth was “seeded” from space, instead of arising by pure chance in some primordial ooze or sea on our planet. Those men believe in evolution—that once it originated, life, as Charles Darwin proposed, has ever since been growing in complexity and “evolving” through natural selection and random mutations, or DNA copying errors, into the life and beings we see and are today. Among other signs, the rebel scientists cite the evidence for vast clouds of microorganisms in space, and the identification in certain meteorites of bacterial and fungal micro-fossils, along with a number of amino acids. They claim that even at 4.6 billion years, the earth mathematically is not old enough for life to have had the time to evolve (beginning about 3.8 billion years ago) into its enormously complex current forms. That lack of ordinary time in evolutionary theory is a question Jane and I have often wondered about.

The panspermian theory is that life reached the Earth from a living organization permeating our entire Milky Way galaxy, and that there is a creator, or intelligence, or God out there. In talking with Jane this noon I went the step further by saying that the galaxy itself is alive—not merely full of life. Jane and I discussed various ways that All That Is could have seeded life on earth through the roles of probabilities, and how certain successive forms could take root upon the earth when environmental and psychic conditions were right, and so give the appearance of an evolutionary progression. All That Is, I said, might have offered those same incipient forms to the living earth many times, only to have the earth reject them or fail to develop them for many reasons. But even these latest scientific theories are based upon ideas of a past, present, and future; their proponents do not consider that basically time is simultaneous—that the universe is being created now. We had an interesting discussion. In Chapter 1 of Dreams, see sessions 882 and 883.

15. Seth may think that his own term, “value fulfillment,” “is woefully inadequate to express the nature of life’s diversity, purpose, or meaning,” but over two years ago, in Chapter 2 of Dreams, he gave what I think is an excellent interpretation of that quality. In Session 884 for October 3, 1979, he came through very emphatically in one of Jane’s best sessions: