The phrase “conscious creation” has been used for decades, possibly longer. Applying the term to the Seth Material can be traced to Lynda Dahl, who published three books in the 1990s that used “conscious creation” to mean “you create your own reality.” (1) The latter phrase was coined by Jane Roberts in The Nature of Personal Reality (1974). It went on to become a New Age mantra most recently uttered by Amit Goswami in the New Age hit What the F%#? Do We Know? (2004). So it’s popular in the Seth community to use the phrase “conscious creation,” and sometimes YCYOR (you create your own reality) to represent the core ideas in the Seth material.
However, this concept has been around for millennia. It’s traceable back to the New Thought movement founded by Phineas Quimby in mid-19th century America. Moreover, it extends all the way back in some form to the Idealist philosophers, from Plato to Plotinus and Nagarjuna, onwards to Fichte, Schelling, Schopenhauer, Hegel, Berdyaev, and others. Seen in this light, Jane Roberts’s The Physical Universe as Idea Construction (1963) is actually a variation of Western idealism. Thus, the Seth material is a form of idealism found in twenty-three Seth-dictated books (1970-2004). As such, the phrase “conscious creation” doesn’t accurately define what makes the Seth material unique from or related to other bodies of work. Therefore, I define conscious creation more broadly to include two foundational concepts:
- All-That-Is as physical, subtle, and causal fields of consciousness.
- All-That-Is as Primal Cause through the action of involution/evolution.
Thus, “conscious creation” applies to any premodern, modern, or postmodern body of work that explores the simultaneous action of involution/evolution in physical, subtle, and causal fields. For instance, postmodern examples include the information offered by Elias and Mary Ennis, and the Kris Chronicles published by Serge Grandbois and Mark Bukator. Premodern examples include Vedanta Hinduism and Vajrayana Buddhism. Regarding concept 2 above, involution/evolution is the action of Causal Consciousness that creates All-That-Is. The action of involution outlines how All-That-Is acts as Primal Cause to create causal, subtle, and physical fields. For example, Seth used consciousness units (causal CUs) and electromagnetic energy units (subtle EEs) in this way in Dreams, “Evolution,” and Value Fulfillment (1986). (3) Sri Aurobindo used the Hindu Vedantic version of involution in The Life Divine (1949)... While the premodern traditions had an understanding of involution – the action of Consciousness as Primal Cause – what’s missing is an understanding of evolution; Consciousness unfolding in broad stages of increasing complexity over time in the physical field, or what Seth called Framework 1. I’m not talking about the crude distortions of Social Darwinism used by Robber Barons or Nazi Germany to justify economic inequalities or genocide, but the kind of evolutionary theories found in Aurobindo, Radhakrishnan, Chauduri, Gopi Krishna, Teilhard de Chardin, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Wilber. These modern and postmodern thinkers all show the driving “force” behind evolution, natural selection, genetic mutations, etc., to be none other than All-That-Is, not chance, chaos, or randomness...
Thus, when I combine Wilber’s integral approach with the above definition of conscious creation, we get Integral Conscious Creation. Integral simply means balanced, inclusive, and comprehensive. It doesn’t attempt to reduce inner to outer, or vice versa, but properly situates all dimensions of being in the world. We can have Causal Consciousness and quantum fields jointly creating and co-creating...
So what does Christianity have to do with Integral Conscious Creation? Jane Roberts was raised Roman Catholic, but rejected exoteric Christianity outright in her adult life. Her work doesn’t seek to rehabilitate institutionalized Christianity, but instead to move beyond worn out Christian mythos and pave the way for whatever comes next in postmodern terms.
No comments:
Post a Comment