Book Review - The Nature of Personal Reality - A Seth Book

After 25 years of reading books about reality, consciousness and what has come to be called Law of Attraction, this is still my favorite and the one from which I am always learning. Written in 1974, this is the most "personal" of the books dictated by Seth, a discarnate personality who spoke through writer Jane Roberts. Though the mechanism of Seth can be a challenge that turns people off, it's worth overcoming that and pursuing the book anyway. Jane never made any claims for what exactly the Seth phenomenon was; her mission was one of exploration and following where it led her, and having the material speak for itself.The layout of the chapters can seem awkward at first. Included are extensive notes by Jane's husband Rob, including a "session format" that includes date and time of the session, as well as commentary on what was going on in the room and in their lives at the time. While this can be distracting when you are reading the book for its literal content, it makes mor
e sense if you remember that they were exploring the mechanism of delivery as well as the content. The way this is arranged gives a very personal window into the lives of extraordinary people who were certainly willing to follow a most unusual path with great success and humility.That said, this book introduces the idea of creating your reality in a most thorough, in depth way. Seth is articulate and detailed, covering areas like health, relationships, beliefs, our alignment with aspects of this earthly reality, guilt, good and evil and many other aspects of our personal lives. There are many examples using Jane and Rob's lives, and the lives of those who connect with them, to show exactly how it is that we create what happens in our lives. Though some of the references are outdated (there is a long section on why the therapeutic use of LSD is not a good idea) even within those discussions there is much to be gained (in this one, Seth discusses the role of the ego and its va
lue to the psyche).The two predominant themes of the book are: we create reality through our beliefs, and: the point of power is in the present. Seth builds up to these ideas in a most methodical and elegant way, and brings in discussions of many of the "yes, but" or "no way" objections that we automatically make to those ideas, explaining why our denials are based on conditioning, culture based assumptions and personal beliefs. He also explains how to find out what your beliefs are and how to go through or beyond them. There are exercises in the book that strike you at first as so simple as to be pointless, but if you actually do them, turn out to be powerful.As a discussion of consciousness, this is a wide ranging, engaging, fascinating look at a most elusive subject. As a way of interacting with reality, it is an engaging, appealing premise with huge potential. As a window into the lives of some amazing people who blazed a path of discovery into previously unexplored area
s of mind and spirit, it is a powerful story. It's also always interesting to read in this book hints of some of the current "leading edge" discoveries of physics and biology. For example his view of the body as a "feedback system" that expresses our beliefs and emotions is a precursor to the science of epigenetics, which explores how our emotions and thoughts, as well as environmental conditions, can trigger or suppress genetic factors.I have read this book 10 or 12 times in the past 25 years, and each time I find some new insight or way of looking at reality that I'd missed before, or a new deeper way of looking at one of the ideas. It's a book that changed my life in the most profound way imaginable, and continues to fuel that change even today.The Nature of Personal Reality: A Seth BookJane RobertsISBN: 0-553-14772-2

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