If past and future are illusion, there is no life AFTER death

[Sena]

Seth is clear that past and future are illusion, and have no reality outside our physical universe:

"In your terms, the rate at which you discover the facets and realities of the spacious present becomes your camouflage time. On your plane there must be physical manipulation. This gives you also the illusion of past and future, and to you it appears that the present is a fleeting, almost ashen illusion in itself, beyond any true remembrance and beyond the reach of any but nostalgic recall. This is also caused by your camouflage system in which physical materializations appear and grow, mature and disappear.

In the spacious present as it exists in actuality beyond shadow, all things that have existed still exist, and all things that shall exist in your tomorrow already do exist. You on your plane cannot experience such reality except in a very limited manner, and you cannot experience such reality spontaneously, and spontaneity is the quality of the spacious present. To you with your ideas of camouflage time this material may sound strange and unbelievable."

—TES1 Session 41 April 6, 1964

The word "after" becomes meaningless in the context of the spacious present.

Seth clarifies what happens at death:

"Upon physical death you simply step out of the intense focus upon one self-constructed plane. You are released into a wider spectrum of activity. The mental and psychic energy which you have expended in the physical system does continue, to some varying degree, to sustain it. A lingering feeling allows those who have left your system to keep in contact with it if they so desire. I do not mean necessarily that in all cases communication will occur, but a psychic return can be made at will."
—TES8 Session 396 March 4, 1968

Seth has provided the answer to a problem that has baffled philosophers:

"The problem is death. Death brings human existence to an end, and so completes it, but no one can experience her own death. As Wittgenstein put it, unlike dying, one's death is not an event in one's life – not even the last one." (from "Routledge Philosophy Guidebook to Heidegger and Being and Time (Routledge Philosophy GuideBooks)" by STEPHEN MULHALL)

Kindle edition: https://amzn.eu/0rJplbT

[Bora137]

To be fair to Plato he did say pretty much this in Republic with the Allegory of the Cave. In it he has Socrates explain that the life we perceive as real is just shadows projected on a wall. We are chained and can't turn round [to perceive all of reality as we do after death or in the allegory as someone escaping the cave] we only see the one wall the shadows dance upon. We can't see the real objects in this reality we only perceive their shadows and wrongly believe they are all that exist. 

But without reading Seth I would never have really grasped what Plato meant.

"The allegory is related to Plato's theory of Forms, according to which the "Forms" (or "Ideas"), and not the material world known to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality."  As Seth says, ideas (thoughts) create reality.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave

[Deb]

I have a couple of analogies I've been telling myself regarding Seth's explanation of "no moment of death." They are clumsy at best, but you'll get where I'm going with this. One is dreaming. When I am asleep, I am in a dream world that seems real enough, unless I'm having one of those rare lucid dreams. I'm aware of my thoughts, my body, the reality happening around me. Then I wake up and I never think that the dreaming me has died. I've just switched my focus from the dream world to this physical one.

The other is when I look back over my (this) life. The infant I was, the 5 year old, the teenager, young adult, all the different jobs, partners and interests I've had... these "mes" also have not died are are not forgotten. "Their" realities have evolved into who I am today. I continue to evolve.

I imagine the transition into non-physical will be the same. Or at least I hope so.  This quote is fantastic, thank you, no one says it better than Seth:

"Upon physical death you simply step out of the intense focus upon one self-constructed plane. You are released into a wider spectrum of activity. The mental and psychic energy which you have expended in the physical system does continue, to some varying degree, to sustain it. A lingering feeling allows those who have left your system to keep in contact with it if they so desire. I do not mean necessarily that in all cases communication will occur, but a psychic return can be made at will."
—TES8 Session 396 March 4, 1968

That "wider spectrum of activity" makes me think of the ND experiencers talking about how the after-death world is so much richer, brighter, "more" than what we experience here.

BTW I love the Allegory. I bet Plato was a speaker.

[Tob]

To be fair to Plato he did say pretty much this in Republic with the Allegory of the Cave. In it he has Socrates explain that the life we perceive as real is just shadows projected on a wall. We are chained and can't turn round [to perceive all of reality as we do after death or in the allegory as someone escaping the cave] we only see the one wall the shadows dance upon. We can't see the real objects in this reality we only perceive their shadows and wrongly believe they are all that exist. 

But without reading Seth I would never have really grasped what Plato meant.

"The allegory is related to Plato's theory of Forms, according to which the "Forms" (or "Ideas"), and not the material world known to us through sensation, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality."  As Seth says, ideas (thoughts) create reality.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegory_of_the_cave

There may be a difference in that in Plato's philosophy ideas were something absolute. According to Jane Roberts - I assume this applies to Seth as well but I have yet not proceeded so far - the absolute ideas are materialized only to a certain extent, and the specific materialisation does in turn modify the 'absolute' ideas as well. Hence, they are not absolute. I think it is useful to bring up Plato's cave allegory.

[strangerthings]

Ideas get added to the dream city as well....

-----

"The City simply represents, in your terms, an idealized version of a reality that can be physical. And that hopefully will be. And if it is, it will be created in your terms now, through your dreams, your love, your desire and your intent. And then it will seem to be given to its inhabitants, even as it seems to you the earth is given to you. For when you are born everything is here for you. It is given. But by whom is it given? And how is it that it has come? Can I say to you that your Earth originated in a sphere of dreams? That it is a mental creation of others, to some extent, in which you participate. That is indeed what I am telling you. *(In a whisper:) "Think about it."

Deleted Session December 2, 1978

[Sena]

That "wider spectrum of activity" makes me think of the ND experiencers talking about how the after-death world is so much richer, brighter, "more" than what we experience here.

Deb, it is interesting to consider Near Death Experiences. Some describe a life review, going through their entire life experience "in a flash". This seems to imply that our sense of linear time disappears at the moment of death.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Life_review

[barrie]

Linear time is MUCH MORE than simply an illusion--altho Seth has used that term. He has also said that physical reality is REAL--that it is It must be remembered that we created physical to serve a purpose:

Seth (Session 266): WHAT YOU PERCEIVE WITH YOUR PHYSICAL SENSES IS, OF COURSE, REAL. It is one of the forms that reality takes. But if you insist upon believing that ONLY physical data is real, then you see you will never learn what is within it.

Seth (Session 284): "One of the root agreements upon which physical existence is based is THAT PHYSICAL OBJECTS HAVE A REALITY THAT IS ENTIRELY INDEPENDENT OF ANY SUBJECTIVE CAUSE; and that these objects, within definitely specified limitations, are permanent."

Seth II (Session 446): "Before you can be allowed into systems of reality that are more extensive and open, you must first learn to handle energy, and see, through physical materializations, the CONCRETE RESULT of thought and emotion. As a child forms mud pies from dirt, so you form your civilization out of thoughts and emotions, and then see what you have created, and YOU MUST DEAL WITH IT ON ITS TERMS."

Seth (Session 758): "There is little use in trying to discover other levels of your own reality if you insist upon applying the laws of physical life to your own larger experience. Then you will always be in a quandary, and no facts will fit.  YOU CANNOT, HOWEVER INSIST THAT THE LAWS OF YOUR VASTER EXISTENCE, AS YOU DISCOVER THEM, SUPERSEDE THE PHYSICAL CONDITIONS OF KNOWN LIFE -- FOR THEN NO FACTS WOULD APPLY EITHER. You will expect to live forever in the same    physical body, or think that you can levitate with your body at will. You can indeed levitate, but not with your physical body, practically speaking in operational terms. YOU ACCEPTED A BODY, AND THAT BODY WILL DIE. It has limitations, but these also serve to highlight  certain kinds of experience...The "true facts" are that you exist in this life and outside it simultaneously. You are "between lives" and "in lives" at once...Your life is a dreaming experience to other portions of your greater reality which focus elsewhere...EXISTENCE HAS A PHYSICAL VERSION."

Seth (Nov. 21, 1972 Class): "I have said this in my book. An artist may create a warscape, and you can look at it, and it may be a masterpiece. But you are multidimensional creators! And when you create a warscape, then brush strokes suffer, for you are the brush strokes. AND THE GUNS ARE REAL, AND THE WOUNDS ARE REAL. But it is an excellent representation - an excellent multidimensional creative endeavor!"

Seth (Nov. 13, 1973 Class): "ALL EVENTS ARE REAL. You only experience some events, or certain portion of events, and call these physical...In your reality, in a certain way, you form certain...openings through which your thoughts can become REAL. Your beliefs form such...channels, attracting certain thoughts to actuality."

Barrie NOW Comments: Physical Reality, or F1, is NOT simply an illusion. We already had nonphysical (F2), and we NEEDED physical reality in order to HAVE linear time, vulnerability of matter and physical death. We created this things because we NEEDED them. We didn't simply create these things just to recognize they differ from F2 and call them "illusion."

As Seth says, they are MORE than illusions, they are a real aspect of the greater expansive reality--and they SERVE A PURPOSE. Otherwise, we would not have created F1.

We needed F1 and its linear time, vulnerability and physical death in order to learn how to act in harmony with our innate love, compassion and goodness.

According to Seth we created physical reality and joined the seemingly endless reincarnation cycle in order to learn that we create our reality via thoughts, beliefs, emotions and expectations--AND to learn that in so doing we are to include HELPING and NOT HARMING others--to learn how to act in harmony with our nature. Once we learn these two things, we are ready to leave the reincarnation cycle behind and leave the human race--and move on to realities in which reality creation is much more instant, intense and powerful.

We NEED linear time in order to allow ourselves to experience and use the concept of violations and natural guilt...an "instinct" we put in our human selves--an inner tugging which occurs in the PAUSE OF REFLECTION before we repeat a harmful act. Without linear time, there can be NO pause of reflection.

In order to cement in  the learning and lessons to act in harmony with our innate love, compassion and goodness--and to help and not harm others--we also needed the vulnerability of matter and physical death.

So, F1 and its root assumptions--are CRUCIAL and NEEDED for our spiritual evolution, so to speak--to eventually leave the human race behind.

So, to summarize them up as simply illusions that only exist in F1--really MISSES the HUGE REASON why we created F1.

SETH II:  (Session 446): "You are being allowed freedom within limits. The human race is a state through which various forms of consciousness travel. The ideals keep the race pointed in beneficial directions. Thoughts and emotions form the basic. You learn by seeing these turn into physical reality. You may be killed by what you have created. If so, the lesson is doubly learned.Before you can be allowed into systems of reality that are more extensive and open, you must first learn to handle energy, and see, through physical materializations, the CONCRETE RESULT of thought and emotion. As a child forms mud pies from dirt, so you form your civilization out of thoughts and emotions, and then see what you have created, and you must deal with it ON ITS TERMS---In other systems, energy is more directly felt, more extensive. Consciousness has much more freedom in its utilization.

"The lessons must be properly learned before such responsibility...When you leave the physical system after reincarnation, you have learned the lessons, and you are literally no longer a member of the human race in those terms, for you elect to leave it...In more advanced systems, thoughts and emotions are automatically and immediately translated into action, into whatever approximation of matter there exists. Therefore, the lessons must be taught and learned well."

Seth (Session 452:) "Man was not allowed to play with the more dangerous toys until certain evidence was given that he had gained some control. This does not mean that he could not destroy the world that he knew. It simply meant that such destruction was not inevitable. You do not give a child a loaded gun if you are certain he is going to shoot himself or his neighbor. Now the weapons and the destruction are the obvious things that you see. The counterparts are not so evident, and yet it is the counterparts that are important. The self-discipline learned, the control, the compassion that finally is aroused, and the final and last lesson learned, the positive
desire for creativity and love over destruction and hatred. When this is learned the reincarnational cycle is finished.'"

[Deb]

Deb, it is interesting to consider Near Death Experiences. Some describe a life review, going through their entire life experience "in a flash". This seems to imply that our sense of linear time disappears at the moment of death.

Yes, that sounds right, loss of linear time as soon as we're out of here. I've been off and on reading the NDE book Changed in a Flash and the author mentions not everyone has a life review, or maybe they're not aware of it, because you take your beliefs with you and that affects your experience. I think she also said people who have strong religious beliefs will have a death experience that fits in with those beliefs, which aligns with Seth.

"The City simply represents, in your terms, an idealized version of a reality that can be physical.

I suppose I should look this up myself, but is Sue Watkin's book Dreaming Myself, Dreaming a Town in any way related to this? I seem to recall (sorry my brain is fried, crazy day) that the class members were working on a dream city. Sue then did a big dream experiment with a town in New York. I have the book, have not had time to read it yet. I need to track down which book that December 2 quote comes from. Heading over the search engine now.

[Sena]

I've been off and on reading the NDE book Changed in a Flash and the author mentions not everyone has a life review, or maybe they're not aware of it, because you take your beliefs with you and that affects your experience.

Deb, that is a very interesting book which is in agreement with Seth's view of time. A quote from the book:

This again is a very old theme, and again it can be connected to technology, low or high. The lore around death is filled with various sorts of technologies "stopping" at the moment of death. In Europe, before the widespread use of clocks, candles would go out at the moment of death. This was very low-tech, for sure, and maybe it was sometimes just a breeze, but still—the symbolism is there, particularly since gradually melting candles also measured a kind of time. After the advent of clocks, things got a bit more dramatic: mechanical clocks would stop at the moment of death. The message here appears to be at least double. The stopped clock marks the precise time of death, but the stopping of the marking of time also honors the person's entrance into "no time," that is, into eternity. For this was how eternity was often imagined: not as endless time, but as a state outside of time altogether.

[Caleb Murdock]

I want to add to this discussion, but I've gotten to the point where I'm worried about saying something wrong (given that my Seth books are still packed away and I'm not reading them now).

Near-death experiences and the Seth Material are my primary bulwarks against the concept of death.  But I have been a person so completely fooled by physical reality that I can't imagine that death isn't real.  I have been looking for defects in physical reality all my life and have seen previous few of them.  The closest I have gotten are the occasional flashes of ESP, like the time that I was buying something at a store and suddenly was certain that I wouldn't need it (but there were other things I could point to to explain my certainty).

I have spent my whole life looking for small miracles to give me some "confirmed faith" in the Seth Material, but have experienced precious few of them -- even to the point where I wrote a poem about my doubt:

Missing the Mark

The toilet stains that wouldn't yield
in my youth, even with the hard
lashing of a pumice stone, dissolve
today in mere moments with the use
of the appropriate cleaning balm.
Miracles happen, just not the ones
that mend our hearts and change our lives.

(It's not my best poem, but I hope you enjoy it.)

I do seem to be having an unexpected miracle happening now, but I don't want to crow about it until I am sure.

But Seth has come closer than anyone else to explaining why physical reality seems so hard-seth as to be impervious.  His explanation of time (or the lack thereof) is brilliant.

Imagine that you are a circular chalk mark on a blackboard, and the area of the blackboard represents different periods of time.  Physical thinking would indicate that you (the chalk mark) move across the blackboard, always remaining a discrete dot wherever in "time" you go, and that the moment you move, you leave whatever time period you existed in before.  But Seth seems to be saying that we are more like a line than a dot.  As we move through time (represented by the blackboard), we leave ourselves (as a line) in the "past" (a past which is entirely personal and is not shared with others).  If you were to learn how to return to your past, you would not only find your past events, you would find your past self still living those events.

And yet, all aspects of reality (including past, present and future) are always in a state of flux -- that's the part that is hard for me to understand.  If our actions in the present change both the future AND the past, then how can we ever return to the past to witness it?  Yet Seth seems to indicate that such a thing is possible.

Maybe someone who remembers the Material better than I do would like to speak about that.  At this moment, I remember what Edgar Cayce said (the Akashic records) better than what Seth said.

[barrie]

There is no linear time in dreams. Seth says that dreams are closest we get to the afterdeath state while physically alive.

[Sena]

I do seem to be having an unexpected miracle happening now, but I don't want to crow about it until I am sure.

Caleb, thanks for telling us about this, even without the details!

[LarryH]

There is no linear time in dreams. Seth says that dreams are closest we get to the afterdeath state while physically alive.

Yes, Barrie, I have long viewed dreams as a way of looking at time being different from our waking experience. I think it is silly when I hear someone say, "There is no time" or "Time is an illusion". I view time as just being different depending on the reality that we are experiencing. In dreams, we can instantly travel to a different location, we can repeat an experience, we can go back to an earlier experience. But there is still a sense of the passage of time.  My dream journals still have a sequence of events. Even in NDEs, while many experiencers say "There is no time", they also describe a sequence of events. One example was in an interview yesterday with an NDE experiencer in which she was asked if such-and-such happened. She answered, "Not at first." They often use the life review as an example of time being different, since it is complete, yet occurs "in an instant".

[Caleb Murdock]

Larry, my understanding is that when we are not in our human state (or some other state that involves time), we can still experience events in sequence (although we also have the ability to do more than one thing at once), but we have no sense of time passing.  The sense of time passing is built into our human brains.

Seth said we live in a multiverse (although he didn't use that term), and that not all of them have time in them.  In the other universes that do have time, it may work differently (as an example, Seth said it may run backwards).

I like to compare time to geography.  Let's say that I start my existence in land A, then move to land B, then move to land C.  (I am using the word "land", but these could be compared to universes within the multiverse.)  So if I am in land B, then land A is my "past" and land C is my "future".

Another individual may come into existence in land B, then go to C, and then go to A.  That person's past will be represented by land B, and his future would be represented by land A.  So past, present and future are individualized experiences and don't apply to everyone.

I guess I'm just trying to make the point that "sequence" doesn't mean "time".

What makes us immortal is that all "lands" or "universes" exist as part of the "spacious present", so if we exist in any part of the spacious present, we exist forever.

The question for me is whether we ever get tired of existing.  Since we have the option of existing in calmer circumstances than we experience here in physical reality, I can imagine that we may periodically arrive at a place in which we need rest, but a desire for death need never occur.

[strangerthings]

@Deb TPS 5?

[Deb]

@Deb TPS 5?

Jeeeeeez, how do you remember stuff like that??? Yes, plus my search also turned up Mass Events and Dreams, Evolution. I'll check them all out. Thanks!

Update: Never mind, just another unreliable search engine. It is in TSP5 though.

[strangerthings]

@Deb TPS 5?

Jeeeeeez, how do you remember stuff like that??? Yes, plus my search also turned up Mass Events and Dreams, Evolution. I'll check them all out. Thanks!

Update: Never mind, just another unreliable search engine. It is in TSP5 though.

I will just let you think its my memory so my confidence is boosted lollz

( i have it noted lol)