~Speaking of Seth~

I've been meaning to get on here and post.

I've never had anything unusual happen to me.  People talk about OBEs and things like that.  That's never happened to me.  I've been reading Seth off and on since the late 80s.  A couple of years ago I finished reading every Seth book and set them aside for a break.  I've always liked the Seth material and I can admit that I understand about ten percent of what I read, especially in some of the later books.  I also find Rob's commentary to be off-putting.  I'm not what you'd call a Rob Butts fan at all.  He wrote like someone who couldn't stand the fact that his wife was the center of attention.  He wrote like someone who wanted the center of attention to be him.  Just my opinion, of course but it made reading some of the last books a bit difficult because they were more about his musings than anything else.

Anyway, in November, I started reading the Eckhart Tolle books again.  I've always liked the message and though it can be quite esoteric and difficult (for me) to understand, I always feel the truth in it.  Anyway, back in November I was driving home after picking up some sandwiches for me and my wife.  As I was coming into my neighborhood, I was thinking about the material and about how Seth called everything that I was looking at "camouflage".  What happened next is very hard to express.  I wish I'd written it down after it happened.  I had this moment where my vision blinked in and out.  It was kind of like a quick gray out of what I was seeing.  It was less than a second and not enough time to risk driving.  When it came back, everything looked different.  It is difficult to explain in what way.  I could see everything exactly as I've always seen it, but it was like there was another layer on top of it all.  Like an overlay.  It's kind of difficult to explain.  Everything looked like it was comprised of little blocks that were monochrome.  I saw a couple of neighbors walking their dogs and they were enclosed in white bubbles.  The dogs weren't, just the people.  I could still see them but there were bubbles surrounding them.  It's like I could see both layers at the same time.  Probably the most stunning thing was how it made me feel.  I have been struggling with depression and anxiety for the last six years.  I've been trying to work out why and have never made any headway.  Even if it is not consuming me completely (and believe me, sometimes it does), it is always simmering below the surface. That was gone.  All I felt was peace and calm.  Nothing but peace and calm.  I have never felt anything like it.

The weird vision thing lasted less than a minute. But the time I pulled into my garage and shut off the car, it was gone.  The feeling of peace lasted another couple of hours after that and then faded out.

That's the only time this has ever happened to me.  Now I'm back to the anxiety ridden mess that I usually am. 

Anyway, that's my weird story.  I've spent the last three months trying to understand it.  The story is from a three month old memory.  I should have written it down after it happened and I meant to, I just never got around to it.

I'd really like that feeling of peace and calm to come back, but it hasn't.

hi usmaak - wow, this is awesome!!!

i just joined/new to the group, saw this and had to say... it's great!!

i had a somewhat similar experience that i'll get to in another post i've been thinking about, but there was also this moment where i looked around (not driving, thank god!) and everything was shimmering and i was like - oh, it really IS all a dream.

Quote from: usmaak
Anyway, that's my weird story.  I've spent the last three months trying to understand it.  The story is from a three month old memory.  I should have written it down after it happened and I meant to, I just never got around to it.

I'd really like that feeling of peace and calm to come back, but it hasn't.

for me, i always look at things like these as gifts i give myself. you've showed yourself what's possible. what is. now the only question is - how the hell do i actively get myself back there and keep myself there??

just curious, any idea what you can learn or do as a result of that vision/experience? how you can get back there?

i have a lot of anxiety myself, and get myself into these depressive states that are just a pain. i laugh, i say 'the dark lord is back'. god what a pain. i work on my beliefs and think i've broken through some stuff, only for it or something else to come back and just drop me back down. i feel like after working on things for a while that the recurrences are less often, and for the most part not as deep, but when they keep coming back i'm just like... damn, i thought i was over that. perhaps my lesson (that i'm thinking lately) is i just have to accept those parts of me also. and keep working on the underlying beliefs, play in life, and see what tomorrow brings.

as for rob - i agree with you. at one point i so hated his commentary, I think in books 6/7 of the personal sessions, that i stopped reading them entirely. but especially the unrelenting... situation they were in. the constant message from seth of possibilities and forward movement, vs them not really able to change, was getting to me.

but then after stepping back from all of it, and finishing that whole series (and the early sessions), it began to absolutely blow me away that the work in its entirety - and really the whole mix of seth and jane and rob - could not have been a better written non-fiction book/presentation on how you can live your life and what it would result in. or its opposite, if you took the seth material to heart and actually followed it.

their lives were living examples of the work/material, and it just blew me away. now i would not have liked to live my life with that result in order to be a kind of anti-example of the material, but - it's just powerful what the net result is, though. amazing.

so i say my very great thank yous to all three of them, keep my head down and try to work through my own crap so i can have a life filled with travel, margaritas and ben & jerry's ice cream. i don't seem to get nearly enough of all of them, but i'm sure trying my best!

a long digression in there, but i just wanted to say that this experience you had was awesome to hear about, and thank you for it.

Wow, I can't believe another post went somewhat unnoticed. Thank you @michaelk for replying, otherwise I would not have seen it. I have no idea what's going on, I have three admin accounts so I can be sure to at least get one notice of new posts (three different mail clients just in case one of them is filtering messages) and not only did I not get notification of the original January 16 post, but I also did not get notice of the response from today! AND I follow the board, which I shouldn't have to do since Admin is supposed to get notices about EVERYTHING. What the heck? I do see that it got 5 likes though, so I'm surprised no one else replied. And @usmaak, I'm sorry your topic kind of got lost. This tells me I need to upgrade the forum software sooner rather than later, in hopes that the outgoing mail is more reliable. OK, I'm done ranting for now.

As far as Rob, a lot of people just skip over his commentary, endnotes and addendums. I appreciate them to a degree, since he gives a lot of background info and trackbacks to other sessions, but it does slow the reading down. In the beginning I also had the feeling that he was a bit ego centered, but now I'm not sure, but it really doesn't matter to me at this point. He was definitely very passionate about the Seth materials and extremely detail oriented.  And he interacted with Seth almost every day, while Jane could not. Jane certainly could not have gotten anywhere with Seth if it wasn't for Rob and his willingness to spend decades taking notes, painstakingly transcribing them, editing the books, publishing more after Jane died.

If you're at all into audio books, there's someone who has been creating audio of a LOT of the books. He's not a professional narrator, but he's improved over time, and he leaves out Rob's notes. I'll be listening to a few of them on a long road trip in a few weeks. Let me know if you want to know who, where and how to download them.

So usmaak, a fascinating experience for sure, seems dreamlike, but happened in broad daylight. Not something that can easily be explained. I've never had an experience like that, but I can say that I do at times look around me and try to see it as camouflage. In a way I can do that in my mind, ala Matrix, such as when Cypher is explaining that when he looks at the computer screens he doesn't see code but instead blonde, brunette, redhead... but in reality nothing like that happens to me.

So your experience was about 9 months ago... anything like that happen again? The feeling of peace and calm afterwards is amazing, I think I'd be freaking out if that happened to me, but you felt the opposite. That tells me it was more than a vision.

I forgot that I posted this.  It was definitely an interesting experience.  The visual effects were interesting but the absolute feeling of peace and like nothing in the world is wrong is what sticks with me.  Unfortunately I haven't experienced this since.  I drive by that area frequently and I always try to reproduce the conditions that led to it, but I know that these things can't be forced.  I think that the overwhelming feeling of peace is what kept me calm and interested, instead of thinking I was having a stroke or a psychotic break.  It just didn't allow for negative feelings like that.  It did allow for curiosity though.  One time I think that I might have had an OBE.  I don't generally talk about it because it was likely a dream.  This was back during my first time through Seth, in the late 80s.  I was home from school on some break and was sleeping in my bed.  I felt myself rise up and then I rolled over and saw the Christmas candelabra that was in my window.  That was something that freaked me out and it ended quickly.  After a bit of time, I attributed it to a dream of something that I wanted to happen.  The thing is, it didn't have a dreamlike quality to it.  I still remember it, though it was something like 34 years ago.

Regarding Rob.  I am only 51% through the first Early Sessions book.  These books give a perspective on the relationship between Jane, Rob, and Seth that the mass marketed books don't.  He is a bigger part of the story than I'd realized.  I still find his over the top (in terms of quantity) commentary to be overbearing and unnecessary to the content.  I still stand by everything that I said in terms of him wanting it to be about him, but maybe not as strongly as I did.  It does feel like ego played a role in it.  He's still someone who could say something in a sentence or two that, instead, chooses to write pages, and that just bothers me.  But as I make my way through this material again, I am going to try and tolerate it more.  I realize that none of this would have been possible without the combination of the three of them.  Seth may have been the source, Jane may have been the voice, but Rob was the one who recorded it all, and that is a prodigious accomplishment.  Seth even said somewhere within this Early Sessions book that none of this would be possible without the combination of the three of them.  I see that more clearly now.  And some of the historic aspects of his writing is interesting to me.  For instance, the stuff on Three Mile Island (I think it was in Nature of Mass Events).  I was a kid living in Massachusetts at the time and I remember clearly the news anchors saying that there was a chance that if it did melt down and the winds were right, it could bring some of that radioactive fallout over the area.  That freaked me out bad.

well, it seems like you've given yourself at least a few experiences that 99.5% of seth readers would wish for.

i'm always into very practical things i can duplicate and learn from. i've always tried to push this material into something that i can use and do, so pardon me if i'm pushing but - what do you think you've learned from these two very amazing experiences? or on the other side, do you think you've given yourself these experiences so that you can... use them? or build from them? or understand what you're capable of?

hahahahaa - but i suppose the more practical question is - would you like to experience more of these?

and if i'm pushing too much, i'm totally fine if you tell me to shut up. 

Quote from: michaelk
well, it seems like you've given yourself at least a few experiences that 99.5% of seth readers would wish for.

i'm always into very practical things i can duplicate and learn from. i've always tried to push this material into something that i can use and do, so pardon me if i'm pushing but - what do you think you've learned from these two very amazing experiences? or on the other side, do you think you've given yourself these experiences so that you can... use them? or build from them? or understand what you're capable of?

hahahahaa - but i suppose the more practical question is - would you like to experience more of these?

and if i'm pushing too much, i'm totally fine if you tell me to shut up. 

I wasn't thinking of it in terms of learning.  One thing that I've noticed about myself is that I don't tend to think it that way.  If I'm reading, I'm trying to learn what I read.  If I'm going about life and something happens, then it is something that happened.  I do not analyze or think about it much.

So for the maybe OBE but likely a dream.  I don't know.  It was 30+ years ago and that feels like a few lifetimes ago at this point.

For this most recent this, what stays with me as the other memories fade is the feeling of peace.  It felt like literally everything was right and as it should be in the world.  All of my racing negative thoughts that are always trying to pry their way into my thoughts were just gone.  The visual effects were cool, but the feeling is what was important to me.  I could live the rest of my life happy if I could just be in that mindspace on a more permanent basis.  Perhaps that is what it feels like when we let go of all judgement and negativity and just accept fully that we are not the camouflage and that the camouflage does not have any impact on who we really are.  Perhaps it's what it feels like to truly in the moment point and to let go of everything else.

Quote from: usmaak
One time I think that I might have had an OBE.

A couple of years ago I woke up in the morning and I was a couple of inches away from the ceiling, I could see the texture very clearly. When I realized what was going on, I fell back down to the bed at an amazing rate of speed and was afraid I was going to slam back into my body. But instead, I got just so far and then glided in like those cool kitchen drawers they sell at IKEA. Good chance that was a dream, but who knows? I'd have to have some lucid OBEs to consider them legit. At my last Joe Dispenza workshop, he was telling a hysterically funny story about having OBEs on his sofa. He'd scare himself back into his body time after time, making progress in small increments.

I'd sure love to be able to lucid dream regularly, and have OBEs. Kind a coincidence (lol), but yesterday I got an email from Robert Waggoner, who has written some books on lucid dreaming and just happens to teach an online course at The Seth Center. I took the Seth Intensive twice and really enjoyed it. The next dream course is in November, hopefully my life will be less busy the and I can sign up for it. It's $175, and it meets once a week for six weeks.

Quote from: Deb
yesterday I got an email from Robert Waggoner

He was interviewed on Coast-to-Coast last night. I just downloaded the interview a few minutes ago, before I read this post. My ex knows him through the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD).

I recently had my third lucid dream. In the dream, I was having a conversation with my mother and my deceased father. When I became lucid, I took the opportunity to say, "I love you, Dad." He smiled and said, "I love you, too." Then I woke up.

I have had a few brief OBEs that quickly end when I realize I am out-of-body, similar to what Joe Dispenza said.

Quote from: usmaak
Anyway, back in November I was driving home after picking up some sandwiches for me and my wife.  As I was coming into my neighborhood, I was thinking about the material and about how Seth called everything that I was looking at "camouflage".  What happened next is very hard to express.  I wish I'd written it down after it happened.  I had this moment where my vision blinked in and out.  It was kind of like a quick gray out of what I was seeing.  It was less than a second and not enough time to risk driving.  When it came back, everything looked different.  It is difficult to explain in what way.  I could see everything exactly as I've always seen it, but it was like there was another layer on top of it all.  Like an overlay.  It's kind of difficult to explain.  Everything looked like it was comprised of little blocks that were monochrome.  I saw a couple of neighbors walking their dogs and they were enclosed in white bubbles.

usmaak, sorry I missed your post in January. Thanks for sharing your interesting experience with us.

By the way, usmaak, I also missed your interesting post. I was confused about missing it until Deb mentioned the glitch, so my guess is that it was hidden from everyone for months.

The weird thing is that I don't think it was hidden, it maybe have gotten buried (the Most Recent Post Phenomenon). The first thing I did was look at the Likes List on the first post, and quite a few people saw it but didn't post. Honestly, some times I have no idea what's going on. Sun spots?

I was thinking today how I can do a safe test run on upgrading the software, by duplicating SoS in another directory and then updating that one to make sure it's not going to blow up. If all goes well, maybe next week we'll have a new and improved forum. So if you all come here some day and see the site is in Maintenance Mode, that's what's going on. I will add a message to the MM page explaining that as well.

Quote from: usmaak
I wasn't thinking of it in terms of learning.  One thing that I've noticed about myself is that I don't tend to think it that way.  If I'm reading, I'm trying to learn what I read.  If I'm going about life and something happens, then it is something that happened.  I do not analyze or think about it much.

got it, that sounds great.

it just sounds like a wonderful experience.

Quote from: LarryH
He was interviewed on Coast-to-Coast last night. I just downloaded the interview a few minutes ago, before I read this post. My ex knows him through the International Association for the Study of Dreams (IASD).

Wow, well let me add to that. I don't know Robert, he contacted me because (I'm guessing) he just found about me being involved with the Seth Research Project and made a donation. He mentioned some things that appeared to be synchronicities and I told him about one that happened this morning. I then mentioned SoS and that we have a topic all about synchronicities and there are some real doozies in there. He then said he woke up this morning to "a slew of emails about dreams about Mary Dillman." I've not dreamed about Mary, but last night I dreamed about Sena. I guess I need to mention that to him.

I loved your dream about your dad. I've not had a lucid dream in a long time. As soon as I realize I'm dreaming, I wake up. And the OBEs... I'm still hoping. My lucid dreams were realer than real, and I did some experimenting after suggestions from a website on lucid dreaming. I don't know why I'm  holding back. I suppose there's a time for everything (turn, turn turn). 

Quote from: Deb
A couple of years ago I woke up in the morning and I was a couple of inches away from the ceiling, I could see the texture very clearly. When I realized what was going on, I fell back down to the bed at an amazing rate of speed and was afraid I was going to slam back into my body. But instead, I got just so far and then glided in like those cool kitchen drawers they sell at IKEA. Good chance that was a dream, but who knows?

Deb, that sounds very similar to an experience I had at the age of 15. I sat up with a jolt, and I never thought of it as just a dream; it seemed so real to me that I tried for years afterward to induce an OBE. But I finally gave up on that and took up other interests. Even so, I'm still fascinated by lucid dreaming. I have very vivid dreams sometimes, in which I am very aware of my own emotional state, often annoyed or bored with the dream situation, but with zero insight into that situation or control over it. However, I also must admit to myself that on occasion, the waking state doesn't seem all that different when it comes to insight.

For instance, just last night I had a dream where I found myself quite annoyed at my inability to find anything to eat, even though I was in a (very odd) downtown mall, and even though I had lots of interactions around the general theme of getting a meal, I got nothing but a handful of snack food (nuts?). Oh well, it's better than the eternal search for a bathroom, another universal theme.

I have one more story about the time that I probably didn't see a ghost that took place around the same time as the probably wasn't an OBE.

When I was just out of high school, my mom got remarried and we moved in with my stepfather and his kids.  They always told us that my new room was haunted and that they'd seen a red ghost several times.  Of course I just laughed it off and figured that they were messing with me.  We'd all only met a few times before we moved in and were still trying to find the new normal.

I woke up early one morning while it was still dark to a big red ball of light floating over my bed.  And it didn't just vanish.  It hung there for a few seconds.  Scared the hell out of me.  As long as I lived there after that, I never slept with the room completely dark (which explains the Christmas candelabra from the OBE).

I eventually just assumed it was a vivid dream, but it freaked me out at the time.

Ok.  I'm out of stories.

Quote from: usmaak
I have one more story about the time that I probably didn't see a ghost that took place around the same time as the probably wasn't an OBE.

Great recounting, especially tying in the Christmas lights.

As some of the long-term members here know, I spent a few years being a ghost hunter. Or paranormal investigator as we preferred to be known.   I've always been a skeptic about everything, but an optimistic one, lol. Maybe I can just say I prefer to fact check. So, I've had experiences I can't explain by normal standards, but also can't dismiss them. I've seen things (first time when I was around 2), heard things, recorded things that I can't explain. All I can say at this point is that I'm darned happy that there's more to life than what we've been raised to believe. It makes life so much more interesting.

Quote from: KylePierce
Oh well, it's better than the eternal search for a bathroom, another universal theme.

So WTH is that about? I have those dreams all the time. And also problems with phones. Mine have evolved from dial phone and phone booth problems to cell phone problems. So my practical side says a personal issue with concerns about communications. Can I just move beyond those? I used to have dreams about being in an elevator, which could be about concerns about progress, or just a result of having worked on the 47th floor of a skyscraper and spending a lot of time going up and down. Often my dreams are so mundane, they are downright boring. Nothing more boring than a dream about cleaning house.

Quote from: Deb
As some of the long-term members here know, I spent a few years being a ghost hunter. Or paranormal investigator as we preferred to be known.   I've always been a skeptic about everything, but an optimistic one, lol. Maybe I can just say I prefer to fact check. So, I've had experiences I can't explain by normal standards, but also can't dismiss them. I've seen things (first time when I was around 2), heard things, recorded things that I can't explain. All I can say at this point is that I'm darned happy that there's more to life than what we've been raised to believe. It makes life so much more interesting.

Might you share some more about ghost hunting? Or maybe link to old posts? What an interesting line of work! I saw a movie recently, called Light from Light (2019) about a woman ghost hunter. It's set near Knoxville, TN. It was quite watchable but I have no idea how accurate it was in portraying the ghost hunter.

I left out the best part of my story about not finding a place to eat in my dream. There was one scene at the door of a fancy restaurant, where I asked to see a menu, and for the first time in my life, I was able to read something in a dream. I could see the prices clearly and they were $$$. I told the host I couldn't afford it and left. So much for satisfying my hunger, because after that, all the places I tried to get in were already closing.   I'm not that tight in real life, though.

Quote from: KylePierce
and for the first time in my life, I was able to read something in a dream.

Funny story about the restaurant! I've been able to read things in dreams, or at least I think I'm reading something. It's one of my lucid dream experiments, but when I'm awake I can't remember what I read or what it was about, so for me probably a trick of the mind.

Quote from: KylePierce
Might you share some more about ghost hunting? Or maybe link to old posts?

Oh sure, here are some links. This one is more recent and long winded, and there are a couple of short videos from the investigations. I wrote about The Stanley Hotel, Bird Cage Theater, the Villisca Ax Murder House. And my parody team, a knockoff of the TAPS tv show.

https://speakingofseth.com/index.php?topic=2083.msg16640#msg16640

Here's one where we did an investigation in a private home in Park Hill. Possibly my favorite, because we solved a mystery of sorts. And a painting found at a garage sale that involved the house being investigated and another house that ended up being unexpectedly related.

https://speakingofseth.com/index.php?topic=1445.msg12748#msg12748

This is an older thread, where I covered the above locations, plus the Queen Mary and Myrtles Plantation.

https://speakingofseth.com/index.php?topic=579.msg4894#msg4894

I haven't done any investigating for a while. I kind of lost interest, felt I'd investigated the best places already, some more than once. The last one was maybe 5 years ago, the Ohio State Reformatory. Cool building, some of Shawshank Redemption was filmed there, but no activity at all.

Thanks for the tip on the movie, I'll check it. Jim Gaffigan in a serious movie!?! I watched the trailer, it looks interesting. Our investigations were somewhat informal, and after a couple of years I ditched most of the equipment (infrared camera and video, EMF meters, Frank's Box Shack Hack) as I became more interested in personal experiences than getting stuff recorded. But I still have my digital audio recorder, I think EVPs are the bomb.