What follows is an excerpt I recently found in my personal journal. I wrote it Friday, November 25th, 2005, the day after Thanksgiving. It offers the reader a chance to peek inside my mind as I consider some new ideas that I found extremely compelling at the time, and far more so ever since, right up to this moment. In fact, a few months later, I began writing a book, Time, Myth & Magic, that is still a work in progress. Notice also that part way through this piece, I start talking to the reader, even though this was written in and for a personal journal. By that time, I had realized that some day someone else would be reading it, and there was no point pretending otherwise. I guess today is that day.

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So I have been thinking more and more about the stories I tell myself that are best expressed in this way. Although I am learning about the true nature of stories in general, I feel no closer to unraveling my own. I feel the need to find the truth of my stories so that I can at least understand, if not change them. It is becoming almost an obsession, but a benevolent one. It feels more like a survival skill that I am far from mastering. Here are some of the things I have learned so far.

First, I am increasingly certain that I am right about it all being stories, “it” meaning our experience of being alive as ourselves. Once one realizes that our entire experience occurs in the spacious present moment, the intrinsic role of our stories becomes obvious and inescapable. There is no other explanation. The past and future, the elsewhere in space, and our entire interpretation of the present are just collections of stories, personal myths if you like, that we tell ourselves to give context and meaning to everything we experience. This is true even of our sense of self in every detail.

The next thing I questioned was the source of these stories, their nature, and the fantastic tenacity they seem to possess. Then, of course, there is the question of the rules by which old ones can be modified or retired, and new ones added to the mix. This has proven to be a most interesting pursuit.

The temptation, when answering the question of their source, is to look into the “past.” But that is obviously circular, since the past itself is just another story. So the source of our stories must also be in the present, just as the stories themselves are, just as everything else within our experience is and must be. There is a certain rootlessness to this. It is analogous to having both feet firmly planted in thin air. This troubled me for a while, until I realized that it is true: the whole of our physical existence, including but not limited to, physical reality itself, is an arbitrary work of fiction. What is important is that behind and everywhere within it is agreement on that fiction. This is the real meaning of phrases like “the world of agreement.”

So what seems to be true is that there is only one basic story that we share with everyone with whom we interact, though we each have our own variations. Yet even the variations must be faithful to the root story or we are considered at least a hair off center, if not outright insane. This story of ours is a work in progress that, though it is all happening in the spacious present, gives the appearance of going back billions of years. Time can be viewed as a version control system by which we increment the evolution of our shared story. History, then, is an account of that evolution retrospectively.

Thirty years ago I made the observation that nothing is ever destroyed or removed (at least that’s what is in my story). Change occurs by addition only. Yet there is nothing that cannot be changed into anything else whatsoever by addition. If you add enough of the right stuff to it, its original character and identity can be transformed into anything at all. So it is with our stories. We cannot remove anything from them: we can only add to them. This can be done, however, in a way that has the effect of obscuring certain facets to the extent that they seem to disappear altogether.

But we cannot add just  any old thing to our story willy-nilly. There is tremendous resistance to that. Instead we can only add things that connect well to what is already there. It is not so different from Lego blocks: you can add them together in certain ways, but you cannot just jam a peach pit or quartz crystal into them and expect it to fit. There must be a reciprocity between the new addition and some point on the main body.

However, if that were all there was to it, nothing really new could ever change. Fortunately, this is not the case. So how do we maintain this consistency and continuity while allowing for innovation and real change? Good question, and I have a good answer: we must either be very clever or else we need to allow loopholes. Here’s what I mean.

Let’s take the clever approach first. The best example of how this works is the way in which Albert Einstein transformed the reality of Sir Isaac Newton into the one that produce the atomic bomb and quantum mechanics. He did not invalidate Newton’s laws of gravity, motion, and thermodynamics. Instead, Einstein simply put them under a microscope and pointed out that they were only approximations of the way things really work—an excellent approximation, but an approximation nonetheless. As it turns out, Newton’s formulas work extraordinarily well, even today, until you get into mindbogglingly large magnitudes of space, time, mass or energy. In fact, NASA uses them (rather than Einstein’s relativistic ones) in their interplanetary navigation to this day.

To give you a clear picture of how this works, consider the formulas each of these men created to describe the mass of a body in motion. Newton’s is very simple:

M_m= M_o

where M_o is the original mass at rest, and M_m is the same mass in motion.

In other words, there is no difference between the two. Motion does not affect mass. Einstein, however, added some fine tuning. His version goes like this:

M_m= M_o/(1- v²/c²)^½

where v=the velocity of the mass and c= the speed of light.

What is important to understand here is the effect changes in the mass’s velocity have on the objects mass in motion. To see this, one only needs to examine the two extreme examples of velocity: zero and the speed of light. If v=0, then v²/c²=0, 1-0=1, the square root of 1 is 1, and the mass at rest divided by 1 is itself. In other words, exactly what Newton said.

However, when we give velocity a value of the speed of light, we get something entirely different. Now v²/c² is equal to 1, 1-1=0, and M_o/0 is…wait a minute, we are not allowed to divide by zero! So mass cannot be defined at exactly the speed of light! We don’t have the math for it. However, if velocity were 99.99999% the speed of light, then we can see that as v approaches c, the value of M_m approaches infinity.

What all this means is that at velocities that are not particularly close to the speed of light, the mass of an object does not change appreciably from its rest mass. Only as it starts to approach the speed of light does it begin to get more massive, to the point where, as it approaches that barrier, it has nearly infinite mass. This is the basic relationship that has led to the famous conclusion that no mass can be accelerated to, much less beyond, the speed of light. It is considered an absolute barrier to the physical dimension.

So, getting back to our original point—how one can add dramatically new elements to our collective story line if we are clever enough—this is how Einstein added everything to our universe that requires relativity to exist and make any sense at all. He did not have to destroy or remove Newton’s Laws: he had only to modify them by addition, in this case by fine tuning. You could say he added a relativistic fudge factor. Had this extension not been added, then none of our modern technology could even exist: not only the bomb and nuclear power, but computers, exotic materials, and others too numerous to mention. In other words, it was HUGE! It had the effect of increasing the breadth, depth, and scope of physical reality by—pardon the expression—light-years.

So we can add new and radically different plot elements to our shared and private stories in this way, but though it may not take an Einstein to do so this way, it does require a certain creative bend that many of us lack.

Enter the other, and far more common, method of innovation by story extension: the loophole. By loophole I simply mean a catchall explanation, a way of joining a new story element to the original, that allows for some degree of mismatch. One of the most obvious of these is called a miracle. The dictionary defines a miracle thusly:

A marvelous event manifesting a supernatural act of God.

The operative word here is supernatural. In other words, “the rules are suspended.” This creates the loophole. However, we cannot call every little thing we would like to add to our story a miracle, just because it doesn’t fit into the standard template. So this loophole is of limited use, being generally reserved for extraordinary events that are at once extremely compelling (usually in the positive sense) and at the same time without explanation within the context of our existing story.

Other versions of the supernatural loophole are less restrictive. Everything from flying saucers to ESP to channeling to [fill in the blank] are all candidates for this type of loophole. So this is the one that is most often used by the majority of people. Yet even this approach has its limits. If everything becomes an exception, what happens to the rule? How will you be able to share your new version of our story with others who are not as lenient about the freewheeling use of loopholes? If you abuse this tactic, you are likely to take your story additions to your grave with you, leaving no imprint behind that they ever existed (yes, I know, just another story).

So when all is said and done, we are still left with the story-in-progress, and all the personalized versions we all cling to.

There is one more major feature of our stories that we haven’t yet touched on: tenacity. Once a new element is added to the story and becomes accepted, it wants to be forever. If you even think about adding something that contradicts it, you will hear screaming the like of which would be upsetting in Hades. For good or ill, we are in certain major respects bound to our existing stories. Only by adding new elements in an acceptable way can we obscure or reverse outdated or undesirable elements. But there is a good reason for this.

First, if we are to share reality, we must agree on what it is. Otherwise, we are like jazz musicians who get together to jam, but find that they each know the same tune in different keys. What a cacophony that would be. Similarly, if your version of the story said that Hitler won WWII, imagine how that would match up with the official version of other people’s WWII story. So one general version prevails, and though some freedom is allowed in the details, the main thrust must be accepted more or less unanimously.

This, however, brings up an interesting and potentially powerful point: differences between individual stories only become important when we start comparing them. For example, half the people you know may have accepted stories where there was a significantly different end to WWII than the one you accept. But if the subject never comes up between you, neither party would have any way of knowing that these differences exist. So what we are really talking about here is not that our personal versions of the story have to agree in ever minute detail, but that we can only share the portions of our stories that do. As long as we stay away from the “trouble spots,” we can interact.

One more point, just to satisfy the more astute: what about ordinary disagreements between individuals. Surely there is no commonality there? Well, I admit it appears so at first blush. But upon closer examination, you will find that in such cases, each participant actually has accepted the point of view of their counterpart, but they have tried to suppress it (unsuccessfully). So, they don’t think of themselves as believing that variation, and consequently feel obliged to argue against it, while all the time there is someplace within them that actually agrees. This is what brings together people like that. They are trying to work out these particular variations until there is unanimity within their individual story. Argument and dialog is one way to accomplish that. So even though there may seem to be unbridgeable gaps between people’s stories, they are in actuality nothing more than penciled in extensions that have yet to be fully worked out and integrated.

And this whole piece is just one such. If there was nothing in you that was consistent with and open to these views, you would not only not be reading this, but would likely live your entire life without being aware that it (or I) existed. The fact that you are experiencing it means that there is something within you that thinks it is, or may be, true. No exceptions.

Conversely, if you disagree with me, and I find out about it, then I must have my own doubts (or mixed certainties, as I like to call them). If, on the other hand, I don’t find out, then it says volumes about you, but little about me.

So that’s the short course on stories. There is so very much more to it, even now, but this is all I have worked out so far that I’m prepared to stand behind.

In closing let me say that one of the challenges I face in exploring this direction lies in integrating it with my own story. I am trying to use the same kind of approach Einstein did, because it tends to be more rigorous, more stable, and more enduring. The cheap out (miracles) just doesn’t give one much to build on afterward, and I seek only that which will seed great extensions to the story, those that can make an extensive, powerful, and positive change for anyone who chooses to adopt them.

So on the day-after-Thanksgiving, I am above all thankful for the opportunity and ability to explore in these kinds of directions. It is, I believe, what I came here to do above all other things. That’s my story, and I’m sticking to it.

And this is my story today, such as it is. What’s yours?

There is a subtle but critical difference between intellectual and personal acceptance. It took me a lot of years to reach the place where I felt I had to go one way or the other, the conventional reality view or Seth’s. When that time came, my choice was to consciously, intentionally, choose to create a situation in which the only thing that could save me was my own intent to move on, and the magic. There was no “practical” solution, and I did nothing to obtain one. I just climbed into the back seat of the vehicle of my life, and let the magic drive.

It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done to get to that point, a surprisingly easy thing to make the choice, and amazingly easy once I was in the back seat. And guess what? It worked. The magic came through, and a new era began.

Now make no mistake, this new edition of my life was not born 7 feet tall with a lifetime contract with the Lakers. Hardly. But it is solid. Somewhere deep inside there has been a shift in my personal center of gravity. Now when the minions of fear threaten to invade my conscious mind, and I debate whether to take them seriously as I’m “supposed” to, or to trust the magic, trust myself, to create something beautiful out of it, I always slide smoothly to the side that smiles and says, “It’s all working fine, because that’s how I want it, and I am the creator.” So far, every time that has happened, I let the magic work, and always something–often in the form of just the right thought–has come out of nowhere and given me an answer in a timely way.

I have been trying to collect my thoughts about what exactly changed to permit this new round of growth of being. The best I can say right now (I’m not through reviewing it yet) is that I took back some very important choices. By “took back” I mean that they had been on auto-pilot for a very long time, always responding to similar circumstances in similar ways. Now I have taken back my conscious choices in those areas.

It is important to understand that I’m talking about choices that were so automatic, they didn’t seem like choices at all. They seemed rather to be “facts,” “the way I am,” “the way people are,” etc. So what really started to break things loose was when I decided to admit the truth: that I and only I choose what my answers to those questions are, and I’ve been making those choices the same (and I now believe wrongly) for nearly my whole life, and that I and only I can change that by insisting on making those choices consciously again. And I meant it!

Once I did that, I began changing choices about what is true, who I am, and what I will do about it. These changes brought up new questions and drew me into new thought patterns. Priorities changed and powerful new choices emerged. The fear subsided, because I trusted myself not to hurt me, and I found it easier to spend time imagining the kind of person I wanted to be, the kind of life he would have, and the kind of reality he would create, just because of who he was.

These are the choices we make every moment of our lives. Many of them are still on auto-pilot. That’s not a problem. In fact, it’s pretty handy much of the time. The problems come from putting a choice on auto-pilot, forgetting you did it, then finding later that the quality of your life is impaired because of it and feeling powerless to change it. That’s when you need to wake up and remember that it is still, and always has been, a conscious choice. Then and only then can you change it. At that moment, it is as easy as changing your mind. Getting to that point may, however, be somewhat more challenging.

The resistance to taking back manual control usually comes from a fear of making things worse. Our beliefs tell us that, according to their version of who we are and the way life works, this is the only logical thing to expect, so we’d better get used to it. Any thought of changing the choices involved is seen as a threat to an already tenuous status quo. The result? Paralysis. We continue to default to yesterday’s choices, and we stay pretty much in the same rut.

We all have the choice at every moment to take back conscious control of ourselves and our lives. We make those choices who knows how many times a second. And these are the choices that must be changed to produce meaningful growth. There are an unlimited number of ways to go about this, but one thing is always required: intent, conscious or unconscious. Intent is the result of a decision to apply your will to change your way of thinking. Without that, no permanent change is possible. With it, even the sky is no limit.

Notice that I said that the intent doesn’t have to be conscious, though it certainly can be. We sometimes manipulate our intentions at a deeper level. The intent to be born is such a case. The intent to die in a certain way at a certain time usually is, too. These are not ordinarily conscious, but they clearly have their impact.

So nowadays, I ask myself the question “Who do you want to be?” countless times a day. I then ask, “What would he do in this situation?” And then, as best I can, I do that.

So, who do you want to be? Get to know that person. Get inside their head and see what makes them tick. Then ask yourself what they would do if they woke up right where you are. Don’t ask YOU, ask THEM! Then do the best you can with the answer. And make no mistake, it builds, layer on layer, until it changes everything. Use the exercise mentioned earlier, read books, do whatever you think might help. But at the end of the day, it is your choices, moment by moment, about who you are, who you want to be, and how life works that form the palette from which your life is magically created. Your thoughts give it shape, and your feelings give it substance. They are, as Seth put it, “The gift of gods.” And don’t forget to trust yourself in doing so. That, too, is a choice you are already making.

Freedom is a word that is bandied about capriciously by nearly everyone in these United States, yet is one of the most abused words in our language. In the minds of the founding fathers, it was thought of as an absolute thing: either one is free or one is not. Yet even in their creation of the U.S. Constitution, freedom was abridged in numerous ways. The so-called Bill of Rights was appended to that constitution in an effort to shore up some of the potential injuries to the freedom that was left. But even the Bill of Rights is highly conditional. At the very least, it has been interpreted over time in that way.

In George Orwell’s famed novel Animal Farm, the original manifesto of the animal politic paraphrased the assertion scribed by Thomas Jefferson in our own Declaration of Independence: “All [men] animals are created equal.” Later in the course of events that dictum was amended to read: “All animals are created equal, but some are more equal than others.”

This is typical of the ways in which people—many of whom think of themselves as being well intentioned—have slowly, methodically, over the centuries encroached on the “official” definition of freedom until it is barely a shadow of its original definition. Who, why, and how are the topics of this essay.

First a few comments about freedom itself. Freedom has two basic dictionary definitions:

• The condition of being free; the power to act or speak or think without externally imposed restraints.
• Immunity from an obligation or duty.

These can be more simply put as the “freedom to…” and the “freedom from…” Both forms have one central theme in common: no outside force shall interfere with the experience or expression of the individual.

Yet people have always automatically assumed that some abridgement of utter freedom was absolutely necessary, or even desirable. In other words, the “Land of the Free” really isn’t and never has been. It is only in the context of its contemporaries and predecessors that freedom American style seems free at all. By any objective, absolute measure, we are little better off than anyone else. Granted, the closer approach to true freedom instituted by our forefathers was a distinct and substantial improvement, not only over their previous circumstances, but over any that had come before. But in the harsh light of day, either you interfere with the lives of others, or you don’t. Period. And at an intrinsic level we, as a society, insist on doing so. In other words, we get a big fat ‘F’ in Freedom 101.

The reasons why this “must be done” are voiced vehemently whenever the subject is raised. All such objections to a more ideal state of individual freedom have one thing in common: complete freedom equals anarchy, and anarchy is to be avoided at all costs. Except for the brief period during and after the McCarthy witch hunts of the early 1950s, when communism was the ultimate sociopolitical insult, anarchy has always been considered the scourge of humankind. It brings to mind all manner of misfortune: rape, pillage, murder, and mayhem are only the front runners of the pack of ills it engenders. As far back as ancient Greece, anarchy was considered anathema to civilization, culture, and the pursuit of happiness. Yet freedom has been regarded with an almost religious (sometimes literally) reverence. If you are getting a strong whiff of doublespeak, good. You are starting to get the picture.

How can well-intentioned, sincere, and intelligent people for millennia be guilty of such an obvious and persistent fraud? Simple. They’re scared to death and looking for a way out. I’m reminded of Johnny Carson’s favorite W.C. Fields quote. Near the end of his life, Fields, a devout and life-long atheist, had taken to reading the Bible. When a friend caught him in the act one day and asked what he was doing, he responded in his singular drawl: “Looking for loopholes.” Humanity yearns for true freedom in the face of theirfear of what they would do with it.

Before classical Athens, the fear had a lock on its conflict with our passion for freedom. Then the seed was planted. 2,000 years later—one hell of a long germination—it took root in Philadelphia one hot summer. But it was genetically flawed. The fear may have lost its absolute dominion, but it had not lost its power. It hadn’t even lost its dominance.

Now, over 200 years later, we have retreated farther and farther back into that which we love to say long and loudly is the worst of human foibles: repression. Oh, we have a long way to go to enter the lofty ranks of Hitler et al, but we have nonetheless progressed very little in other ways. How can this be? How can we, as a modern and enlightened people, shred to tatters the greatest political prize of all time for which so many have given so much for so long: freedom? To answer that question we need only to turn to our individual and collective self images.

Here are some hints: “To err is human…”; “After all, I’m only human.”; “All that’s humanly possible…”; “Nobody’s perfect.” Is it coming clear? Just to make the point more…pointedly, consider this cheery little picture: an angry five-year-old with a loaded assault rifle in a room with the people at whom he is angry. Call me prejudice, but I have a tough time seeing this as attractive. Yet this pretty well captures the spirit of humanity’s view of itself, individually and collectively. Here’s another oldie but goodie: “Power corrupts. Absolute power corrupts absolutely.” And there you have it. Interestingly, contained in those very words is a tacit understanding that freedom and power are inextricably bound to one another. What better working definition of power than being utterly free to do, be, and have anything you desire. It may not be the ultimate definition, but would you turn your nose up at it?

Underlying all of this is the simple fact that few, if any, of us escape childhood without the belief firmly rooted in our psyche that to be human is to be fatally flawed. We in the Western world even have a term for it: Original Sin. Eve (and later Adam) sought after forbidden knowledge, as a consequence of which they and their progeny forever were condemned to death. What’s more, according to the conventional wisdom, they richly deserved it. After all, God is good. Right?

As Mark Twain once observed, in his audacious monograph Letters From the Earth, “if we say man invented God, we slander man. If we say God invented Himself, we slander Him. Is there no escape?”

So for thousands of years, man has viewed himself as at best a second-class citizen of this corner of the Universe. He has developed a not inconsiderable mistrust of himself and his fellows, and that mistrust has not been acquired without producing any evidence of its inescapability. In both the individual and collective spheres of human endeavor, we have proven persistently that we are in fact not to be trusted. This view has become so endemic that almost no one, even the most gifted thinkers of all time, have ever seriously questioned it. Even René Descartes, author of the now-famous phrase cogito, ergo sum, “I think, therefore I am,” never considered the possibility that humanity might not be the black-hearted clods they had always seen themselves as.

Is it any wonder then, that for all these years, governments have been instituted to protect us, not just from each other, but from ourselves. Is it any wonder that anarchy—the complete absence of government—has come to be viewed as a juggernaut to be avoided like the Black Plague or AIDS? Is it any wonder that we insist on abridging our own freedom, and that of others, at the drop of a (self-deprecating) thought? How else could it be?

The truly remarkable feature of democracy American style is that it was based on an enormously more generous view of human nature. Our founding fathers were willing to risk more on our intrinsic goodness than any other political force in all of recorded history. And here we are, centuries later, still alive and, after a fashion, well. We are the most admired (and hated) nation on Earth, not to mention the most powerful, the richest, the most emulated, the most envied, the most sought after.

The real dilemma we face now (and in truth, probably always have) is, “where do we go from here?” The answer is obvious from what I have already written. For thousands of years—that we know of with certainty—humankind has been growing ever so slowly away from that paranoid view of itself. We have been doing our level best to make a wardrobe change: from the tatters of the moral leper, to the fine vestments of a free patrician. In many ways, so far so good.

But we have our work cut out for us. We have a long way to go before sanity and truth rule, and the insanities of the past are just a distant and unwelcome memory. The price we must pay is to divest ourselves of the last traces of our self-contempt and replace it with a whole, sane, and truthful appraisal of what it really means to be human.

The term “Human Nature” is another that is tossed around by people whose tongues should catch on fire just for saying it. They talk about it as if they had the slightest clue what they were saying. They think that their own personal version—and at the end of the day, there is no other kind—is a great, cosmic law. Well, I’ve got news for them: natural laws cannot be broken. That’s what makes them laws. If you throw a million people from airplanes at 30,000 feet without parachutes, how many will survive the fall? Let me think. Zero? Now that’s a law: the law of gravity. No exception (we will for the moment overlook the odd Ascended Master who walks across clouds as easily as your swimming pool).

Invariably, people’s definitions of human nature are based on two things: what they have been told, and what they have seen. Neither of these can possibly lead them anyplace but the insanity already described. The only way to escape falling into the same conceptual trap is to think well and freely. That is something that few seem ready, willing, able, and determined to do. As Frank Lloyd Wright once said, “My only sin is the unforgivable one of having [original] ideas.” Even the peer pressure that so relentlessly steepens the walls of the pit of our ignorance is there for a reason: without it, people might get uppity and exceed their place. They might think themselves freer than they ought to be.

The long and the short of it is this: we have been on a quest for millennia to make the world, our human world, safe for real freedom, and our job is not yet done.

It is oft said that the prerequisite of democracy is an educated populous. If that is so, then the prerequisite of a free, working anarchy is much higher. It is nothing less than a sane populous. By this I mean a people who understand the truth about human nature, not just a bunch of ill-though-out mumbo jumbo born of an era when herding camels was something to be aspired to. Sanity in this context means understanding from the depths of your soul that you can gain nothing of value by violating the life, property, or freedom of anyone—not even yourself. It requires us to acknowledge that we are the authors of our own lives, times, and everything within them. It demands that we recognize the vast and unseverable connections we have to each other, the Earth, its inhabitants, and the Universe as a whole. There can be no complete sanity without the final, undisputed acceptance of our own divinity. These are the beliefs that must change before we can conduct ourselves and our affairs in a manner responsible enough to support a free anarchy. Anything less would have painful consequences. Anything much less would be an unmitigated disaster.

How do we get there from here? Simple. First, we have to realize that’s where and who we need to be. Then we look at who and where we are, and plot a course. The rest is just a matter of placing the right foot in front of the left and dealing with whatever it brings up.

And that is precisely what we are and have been doing all along. The difference now is that we are rapidly approaching the point where we are close enough to start doing more of it at a conscious level, rather than the slipshod, bumbling way we have somehow managed to get this far (it only took a few million years).

Yet we have given ourselves one “training aid” after another to keep us headed generally in the right direction. In this century, we have used advanced technology to up the ante. The two most noteworthy of these technical marvels were the atomic bomb and the Internet. These two are far more closely interrelated than anyone supposes. The former all but mandated the latter, for it was out of the military paranoia of the Cold War that the predecessor of the Internet was spawned, and from its ashes that the full-blown Internet erupted (within a few months!) like a newborn hungering for long-awaited life. The Cold War tore us apart and threatened to destroy us. The Internet is drawing us together and promising to make us, at long last, whole.

So we are not without our miracles, we humans, though we do have a knack for taking our sweet time. On the other hand, even one as audacious as me cannot say with certainty that any small speck of it has not indeed been necessary. Regardless, here we are and this is our mission: to heal our beliefs and restore our sanity, if it was ever there to be lost, or to confer it upon ourselves if not.

In the final analysis, freedom is simply a state of mind. In other words, you are as free as you truly believe you are. At this point in our evolution, it appears that our beliefs are, putting it kindly, a mixed bag.

“The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Those were the famous words spoken by Franklin D. Roosevelt during his first inaugural address, and while he showed much greater insight than most people, before or since, he didn’t have it all figured out. Not by a long shot. On one hand, fear is much more subtle than that, and at the same time simpler. What follows is, I believe, not so much a matter of opinion, but rather a description of simple observations anyone can make, but few do.

Fear is our emotional response to a situation in which we expect to lose something we love or value. It can be a person, an object, a dream, comfort, joy, or just a thought. Whatever it is, we have the expectation that we are in danger of losing access to it. Set that down. The next question is, what is expectation?

We expect whatever our beliefs about ourselves, life, the universe and everything tell us we should, given our best understanding of our present situation. If our beliefs are truthful, our expectations will be accurate. They will also be attractive. If our beliefs are faulty, our expectations will be, too. And they will usually be unattractive.

For example, if we believe dogs are vicious and wild, then when we see one, we will expect it to go for our throat. Some will, but some won’t. If we believe that dogs are warm and cuddly, we will expect them to be friendly and lovable. Again, some will, and some won’t. Remember that.

But a single belief (and the expectations it spawns) does not necessarily lead to fear. It takes two beliefs to produce fear. I call them the Hammer and the Anvil. The hammer is a belief in the dangerousness of something. When this thing is present, it means danger. The Anvil is a belief that we are powerless to defend ourselves from that danger. Only when both beliefs are present are we compelled to expect a losing battle, and therefore feel fear. When you think about it, it’s pretty obvious.

If you believe that someone wants to hurt you, but you are surrounded by a team of commandos who love you, chances are you won’t feel much, if any, fear. Why? Becasue you don’t feel powerless to defend yourself. Conversely, if you are alone and totally vulnerable, but sense no danger of any kind, you will not feel fear. It is only when the Hammer and the Anvil come smashing together, with you in between, that you feel fear. But not all fear is created equal.

There are three variables that affect the degree to which you feel fear:

• the strength of the love or value you place on what you expect to lose
• the strength of your expectation of the danger
• the strength of your belief in your own powerlessness

The greatest fear comes from an absolute certainty that you are in immediate danger of losing something highly valued (your life, or the life of a loved one, for example) and you believe you are  without any visible means of defense. The greatest sense of safety occurs when you perceive no threats and/or feel totally empowered to defend yourself. Most of life falls somewhere in between.

Virtually all so-called “negative” emotions grow out of fear. Anger is the simplest example. Show me an angry person, and I’ll show you a frightened person. Anger is one response to perceived threats. Without a threat, no one feels anger. And no one who feels empowered to defend against a threat feels anger. Anger is only felt by those who see a danger against which  they feel they unable to defend themselves. Ring any bells? Yep. They are frightened, and frightened people get angry.

Hatred is just a specialized form of anger. So are resentment, envy, jealousy, and others. They all have one thing in common: they are a response to fear. And, as we have seen, fear is a response to a pair of beliefs, one in danger, the other in powerlessness.

In our culture, even the word fear has been all but banned in many of the contexts in which it is most present and debilitating. Words like “stress,” and “anxiety,” for example, are used to describe or label a variety of things for which “fear” would be a much more honest, direct, and useful term. You can “deal with stress,” but you can eliminate fear! How? Simple. You change the beliefs that create it.

The beauty of this approach is that these beliefs are virtually always lies. They convince you of threats that do not exist except in your own mind, and they further convince you of powerlessness that is equally erroneous. So they really can’t stand the bright light of day. Why do you think they hide behind words like “stress” and “anxiety?” If you look right at them, you might realize that they are just pure fiction.

Want proof? Of course you do. Here is a challenge. Set a little egg timer in your mind that will go off at least several times a day. When it does, look around and see if you can find a clear and present danger. I don’t mean one that your mind is convinced may be in the next minute, or next room, or the privacy of someone else’s mind. I mean a hungry lion look right at you from 20 feet away with lunch on its mind.

If you do this, you will find that you never, I mean never ever ever, find any such danger! The truth is that you are safe. Always. The only exception is if you fret about danger and powerlessness so constantly, for so long, that the Law of Attraction has no choice but to answer your insistent thoughts (and emotions). Usually, you are only given plausible evidence that the threats exist. But if you keep at it, every now and then, the danger arrives. However, this is highly unusual, and requires a lot of devotion to create it. As Seth once put it, “the Universe leans in your direction,” meaning that beneficial thoughts are given more weight than harmful ones.

So when you hear words like stress, and anger, and hate, know that what is really being addressed is fear, and that behind that fear are beliefs that demand it. If you would change the outcome, you must change the beliefs that create it. Nothing else will do.

One more word should be introduced here: peace. Peace is what you get when safety is a root assumption, and it is all there can be when no beliefs in danger or powerlessness remain. And not one nanosecond sooner.

(From The Seth Material)

Now, and this will seem like a contradiction in terms—there is nonbeing. It is a state, not of nothingness, but a state in which probabilities and possibilities are known and anticipated but blocked from expression.

Dimly, through what you would call history, hardly remembered, there was such a state. It was a state of agony in which the powers of creativity and existence were known, but the ways to produce them were not known.

This is the lesson that All That Is had to learn, and that could not be taught. This is the agony from which creativity originally was drawn and its reflection is still seen.

Some of the discussion is bound to be distorted, because I must explain it to you in terms of time as you understand it. So I will speak, for your benefit, of some indescribably distant past in which these events occurred.

All That Is retains memory of that state and it serves as a constant impetus—in your terms—toward renewed creativity. Each self, as a part of All That Is, therefore also retains memory of that sate. It is for this reason that each minute consciousness is endowed with the impetus toward survival, change, development, and creativity. It is not enough that All That Is, as a primary consciousness gestalt, desires further being, but that each portion of It also carries that determination.

Yet the agony itself was used as a means, and the agony itself served as an impetus, strong enough so That All That Is initiated within itself the means to be.

If—and this is impossible—all portions but the most minute last ‘unit’ of All That Is were destroyed, All That Is would continue, for within the smallest portion is the innate knowledge of the whole. All That Is protects Itself therefore, and all that It has and is and will create.

When I speak of All That Is, you must understand my position within It. All That Is knows no other. This does not mean that there may not be more to know. It does not know whether or not other psychic Gestalts like It may exist. It is not aware of them if they do exist. It is constantly searching. It knows that something else existed before It own primary dilemma when It could not express Itself.

It is conceivable, then, that It has evolved, in your terms, so long ago that It has forgotten Its origin, that it has developed from still another Primary which has—again, in your terms—long since gone Its own way. So there are answers that I cannot give you, for they are not known anywhere in the system in which we have our existence. We do know that within this system of our All That Is, creation continues and developments are never still. We can deduce that on still other layers of which we are unaware, the same is true.

The first state of agonized search for expression may have represented the birth throes of All That Is as we know It. Pretend, then, that you possessed within yourself the knowledge of all the world’s masterpieces in sculpture and art, that they pulsed as realties within you, but that you had no physical apparatus, no knowledge of how to achieve them, that there was neither rock nor pigment nor source of any of these and you ached with the yearning to produce them. This on an infinitesimally small scale, will perhaps give you some idea of the agony and impetus that was felt.

Desire, wish, and expectation rule all actions and are the basis for all realities. Within All That Is therefore, the wish, desire, and expectation of creativity existed before all other actually. The strength and vitality of these desires and expectations then became, in your terms, so insupportable that All That Is was driven to find the means to produce them.

In other words, All That Is existed in a state of being, but without the means to find expression for Its being. This was the state of agony of which I spoke. Yet it is doubtful that without this ‘period’ of contracted yearning, All That Is could concentrate Its energy sufficiently enough to create the realities that existed in probable suspension within It.

The agony and the desire to create represented Its proof of Its own reality. The feelings, in other words were adequate proof to All That Is that It was.

At first, in your terms, all of probable reality existed as nebulous dreams within the conscious of All That Is. Later the unspecific nature of these ‘dreams’ grew more particular and vivid. The dreams became recognizable one from the other until they drew the conscious notice of All That Is. And with curiosity, and yearning, All That Is paid more attention to Its own dreams.

It then purposely gave them more and more detail and yearned toward this diversity and grew to love that which was not yet separate from itself. It gave consciousness and imagination to personalities while they still were but within Its dreams. They also yearned to be actual.

Potential individuals, in your terms, had consciousness before the beginning or any beginning as you know it, then. They clamored to be released into actuality, and All That Is, in unspeakable sympathy, sought within Itself for the means.

In Its massive imagination, It understood the cosmic multiplication of consciousness that could not occur within that framework. Actuality was necessary if these probabilities were to be given birth. All That Is saw, then, an infinity of probable, conscious individuals, and foresaw all possible developments, but they were locked within It until It found the means.

This was in your terms a primary cosmic dilemma, and one with which It wrestled until All That It was completely involved and enveloped within that cosmic problem.

Had It not solved it, All That Is would have faced insanity, and there would have been, literally, a reality without reason and a universe run wild.

The pressure came from two sources: from the conscious but still probable individual selves who found themselves alive in a God’s dream, and from the God who yearned to release them.

On the other hand, you could say that the pressure existed simply on the part of the God since the creations existed within Its dream, but such tremendous power resides in such primary pyramid gestalts that even their dreams are endowed with vitality and reality.

This then, is the dilemma of any primary pyramid gestalt: It creates realty. It also recognized within each consciousness the massive potential that existed. The means, then, came to It. It must release the creatures and probabilities from Its dream.

To do so would give them actuality. However, it also meant ‘losing’ a portion of Its own consciousness, for it was within that portion that they were held in bondage. All That Is had to let go. While It thought of these individuals as Its creations, It held them as part of Itself and refused them actuality. To let them go was to ‘lose’ that portion of Itself that had created them. Already It could scarcely keep up with the myriad probabilities that began to emerge from each separate consciousness. With love and longing It let go that portion of Itself, and they were free. The psychic energy exploded in a flash of creation.

All That Is, therefore, ‘lost’ a portion of Itself in that creative endeavor. All That Is loves all that It has created down to the least, for It realizes the dearness and uniqueness of each consciousness which has been wrest from such a state and at such a price. It is triumphant and joyful at each development taken by each consciousness, for this is an added triumph against that first state, and It revels and takes joy in the slightest creative act of each of Its issues.

It, of Itself and from that state, has given life to infinities of possibilities. From its agony, It found the way to burst forth in freedom, through expression and in so doing gave existence to individualized consciousness. Therefore is It rightfully jubilant. Yet all individuals remember their source, and now dream of All That Is as All That Is once dreamed of them. And they yearn toward that immense source, and yearn to set It free and give It actuality through their own creations.

The motivating force is still All That Is, but individuality is no illusion. Now in the same way do you give freedom to the personality fragments within your own dreams and for the same reason. And you create for the same reason, and within each of you is the memory of that primal agony—that urge to create and free all probable consciousness into actuality.

I have been sent to help you, and others have been sent through the centuries of your time, for as you develop you also form new dimensions, and you will help others.

These connections between you and All That Is can never be severed, and Its awareness is so delicate and focused that Its attention is indeed directed with a prime creator’s love to each consciousness.

This account needs reading many times, for there are implications not at first obvious.

I would like to say something about the only emotions being love and fear. In a sense that is true, but it can be simplified even further to the point where there is only one: love. Here’s what I mean.

Fear is the emotion we experience when we have the expectation that we are about to be separated from what we love, or more accurately just from love itself. We expect that which our beliefs tell us is the logical outcome of our perception of what is right now. In other words, based on our beliefs about what is already happening, we look into the future and see what seems most likely to happen next. If what we see in our future includes becoming separated from love, we feel fear. The stronger the love, and the stronger the belief that we are going to be separated from it, the greater the fear will be.

But it all comes down to the beliefs that determine our perception of the present, and our expectations of the future. There is also another aspect to it. In order to feel fear, we must belief two things about the future. We must believe that there is a threat to the free expression and experience of love, and also that we are powerless to handle it effectively. If there is a threat, but we feel confident in our ability to deal with it, then there will be little or no fear. Conversely, if there is a belief in powerlessness, but little or no threat, then fear does not have a chance to take root. I call this kind of situation a “hammer and anvil”. It takes both to turn it into fear.

So in the case of relationships, for example, you must believe first that there is a threat to the free expression and experience of love, and also that you will be powerless to neutralize that threat. Most of us can identify those feelings and expectations in our experience. Our challenge now is to see them coming if they present themselves again, and withdraw our support for the beliefs that spawn and drive them.

The truth is that there is no threat to love except our belief that there is, and we are anything but powerless to neutralize it even if it does happen. In other words, you are absolutely safe. So fear not, Dear Heart. You are forever wrapped in the loving embrace of the one who loves you best–yourself.

I awoke one morning after a forgotten dream, but with a scene lingering in my mind from the movie “A Beautiful Mind.” In the film, mathematician John Nash hallucinated a little girl for many years whom he believed was real, but whom no one else could see. She was part of his psychosis. Then one day he saw her again, and for the first time realized that she had not aged a bit in all that time. He recognized immediately that she could not be real, because real children grow older. At that moment he knew that he was hallucinating her, and he was never able to take her as real again. He used this newfound insight as a wedge to pry open his insanity, and it ultimately gave him back his life and a Nobel prize in the bargain.

I call this kind of sudden recognition “wisdom of the ageless child.” The power of despair rests on our acceptance of its “causes” as real. Without that acceptance, it simply has no power. To withdraw that power requires a clear and certain recognition that it is not real. The problem is that from within the hallucination, there seems nothing to grab hold of with which to do that. But there is.

For John Nash it was his realization that real children age, and that his illusory child did not, ergo she could not be real. He used that knowledge, that certainty, to pull himself back from the quicksand of his own insanity. The hallucinations did not immediately end, but their power over him did, because he no long took them as real.

There are always ageless children in every illusion, no matter how compelling, no matter how terrifying, no matter how enduring. We must learn to find the ageless children in our own insanity and to use that knowledge to wrench ourselves free of the limitations and even suffering with which we have believed we must live.

There are no magic bullets in this challenge. Each delusion is unique and individual, therefore the answers must be tailored to each specific case. Yet all illusions have loose threads, like the back side of a tapestry, that when pulled, unravel the very fabric of the those illusions. When we know how to look for them, we can find them, and having found them we are never again at the mercy of the unreal.

These illusions are not always the enemies they might seem to be. They can, in fact, be critically important stepping stones on our path to growth and fulfillment. Often we must become completely immersed in our own illusions, to take them absolutely seriously. Nothing less will do. And we have to stretch them out as long as necessary, until we reach the point where we have learned what we needed to learn or experienced what we wanted to experience. Nor can we shortcut the process. If we see or understand too much too soon, it ruins the whole thing, because we no longer take it with the seriousness required to attain our goals.

You’ll know you are nearing the end of such a process when you begin to realize that the delusions you have been using to limit yourself, or in other ways diminish the quality of your life, are not real and never have been. Until that time, you give yourself the perfect situations, with the perfect states of heart and mind, and the perfect supporting cast, and the perfect stage upon which to play it out. And when you finally see it, you are thankful for being so merciless to yourself, for that kind of mercy would have ruined everything.

Perhaps it was Descartes himself who had the first recorded ageless child moment, the one in which he asked himself, “What can I know that it beyond question, beyond my prejudices, beyond my beliefs?” What he realized was that something was “happening,” something he chose to call “thought.” He then reasoned that for thought to exist, there had to be a thinker, whom he called “I.” This led to the now-famous conclusion that because he thought, he must exist. It may seem like hair splitting to a casual observer, but when you’re after absolute knowledge, nothing less will do.

I have discovered ageless-child wisdom myself many times. Sometimes it was much like Nash’s experience: sudden, spontaneous, rootless. On other occasions it was triggered by something I’ve read, or done, or heard, or seen. But always it is unexpected, and always it is a blessing that changes my life in beautiful ways I never before imagined. In fact, that is precisely how this book came to be. I just found myself thinking about the most important things I had learned in my life, and they all fell into three categories: time, myth, and magic. And that’s when it happened. I realized that was the title of the book I had been trying unsuccessfully for over 30 years to figure out how to write. Now it was finally time to do it, and you hold in your hands the proof.

Every system of reality, every system of organization, has certain root assumptions upon which it rests. In our system space, time and matter are among these. We take them for granted, which makes their assumptive nature invisible to us most of the time. But we can step outside of that framework. We each possess the capacity to watch ourselves watch, to think about thinking. When we do so, we can experience ourselves and our reality in new ways, and in the process we recapture the power we must necessarily lose when we surrender to our root assumptions. That power is based on choice.

When you are so immersed in the apparent passage of time that you cannot see beyond it, you forfeit your ability to recognize the full scope of your own experience. You become the servant of time rather than its master. The same applies whenever you acquiesce to any assumption or belief, no matter how compelling or seductive. And nowhere is this clearer or more important than with root assumptions.

Yet we can, at any moment, choose to look directly at these assumptions and beliefs, even those that ordinarily seem unquestionable, and see past them. That is the true source of our power: choice. This is what Nash did with his child. This is what Descartes did with his mind. This is what set them free. And this is what will set you free if you have the curiosity, the courage, and the integrity to insist on knowing the Truth behind the truth of your own being and experience. And this is the journey upon which you are about to embark.

So this is not just chalk talk. This is the real deal. In the pages that follow you will, I hope, find triggers that will awaken the wisdom of the ageless children within yourself. You will see for the first time knowledge and insights that have been there all along, but which were invisible to you until now, hidden in plain sight. And you will know why you did it that way, and why you are discovering it all now.