“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Although there are similarities, then, in our view there are vital differences, too, between Seth’s philosophy and that of many other organized systems. Jane and I prefer to think about the unities we find in our world as including religions, not being defined by them, and we think Seth stresses this. We go along in our own stubborn ways, knowing that our outlooks are rooted in the Western traditions of the world, but also knowing that there exist all about us these numerous other philosophies or systems, some of them many centuries old, that the human race has created to help it explain reality. Yet we feel no compulsion to intimately know the details of, say, Sufism or Brahmanism. (A simile I often think of here compares Eastern and Western life and thought with the right and left hemispheres of the brain; they’re separate, yet united; each half performs functions that complement and to some extent overlap those of the other, and together they operate as a whole.) But we dislike the idea of nirvana in Buddhism and Hinduism, which calls for the extinction or blowing out of individual consciousness, and its absorption into a supreme spirit, usually after a series of lives. And we object to the notion that “nature,” in those terms of linear time, has so arranged things that the individual has to pay a karmic debt in one life as the result of actions in a previous one. Why should nature punish anyone if it doesn’t punish anything? The realities of nirvana and karma are not ones that Jane and I want to create.

We prefer instead Seth’s — as well as our own — concepts of the inviolate nature of the individual consciousness, before, during, and after physical existence, in ordinary terms, and whether or not any theory of reincarnation is involved. It may be natural enough for us in the West not to enjoy the idea of surrendering our individual natures upon physical death, even if intellectually we can understand, for instance, the Buddhist teaching that “perfect” joy can be found in the eventual, blissful surrender of the self to a supreme spirit — although I note with some humor that personally I’ve yet to determine how the self who surrenders knows it’s done so if it’s been so thoroughly absorbed.

I’m more inclined to agree with what Seth told us in the 590th session in Chapter 22 of Seth Speaks: “You are not fated to dissolve into All That Is. The aspects of your personality as you presently understand them will be retained. All That Is is the creator of individuality, not the means of its destruction.” And whenever I read about conventional Eastern conceptions of a supreme spirit, I remember what Seth had to say in the 596th session in the Appendix of Seth Speaks: “I have used the term ‘expansion of consciousness’ here rather than the more frequently used ‘cosmic consciousness’ because the latter implies an experience of proportions not available to mankind at this time. Intense expansions of consciousness by contrast to your normal state may appear to be cosmic in nature, but they barely hint at those possibilities of consciousness that are available to you now, much less begin to approach a true cosmic awareness.”