“DEATH” CONDITIONS IN LIFE

(Humorously): Now: Chapter Ten: “‘Death’ Conditions in Life.” (Seth repeated this chapter heading to make sure I punctuated it correctly.)

The simple fact is that when you dream you are flying, you often are. In the dream state you operate under the same conditions, more or less, that are native to a consciousness not focused in physical reality. Many of your experiences, therefore, are precisely those you may meet after death. You may speak with dead friends or relatives, revisit the past, greet old classmates, walk down streets that existed fifty years earlier in physical time, travel through space without taking any physical time to do so, be met by guides, be instructed, teach others, perform meaningful work, solve problems, hallucinate.

You should be fairly competent and sympathetic. At the same time you should be outgoing enough in your physical environment so that you are capable of handling your life as it is. You need all your resources. This is to be an active exploration and endeavor, not a passive withdrawal, and certainly not a cowardly retreat. Toward the end of this book, methods will be given for those who are interested so that you can explore these after-death conditions consciously, having some control over your experiences and progress.

Here, however, I want to describe these conditions somewhat more thoroughly. Now, in physical life you see what you want to see. You perceive from the available field of reality certain data — data selected carefully by you in accordance with your ideas of what reality is. You create the data to begin with.

(10:54.) Your experience, in other words, follows your expectations. Now the same applies to after-death experience and to the dream experience, and to any out-of-body encounters. If you are obsessed with the idea of evil, then you will meet evil conditions. If you believe in devils, then you will encounter these. As I mentioned earlier, there is greater freedom when consciousness is not physically directed. Thoughts and emotions are constructed, again, into reality without the physical time lapse. So if you believe you will be met by a demon, you will create your own thought-form of one, not realizing that it is of your own creation.

Therefore, if you find yourself concentrating upon the evils of physical existence in such a manner, then you are not ready for such explorations. It is, of course, possible under such conditions to meet a thought-form belonging to someone else, but if you do not believe in demons to begin with, you will always recognize the nature of the phenomena and be unharmed.