In a nutshell, the concept presented by Seth is that we each create our individual realities down to the last exquisitely crafted detail. When it comes to events that affect more than just us, we participate on a group, national, or even global level to create those events. We do this by making decisions—choices—moment to moment about what we do and don’t want to experience. The choices are all made at a conscious level; however, for the vast majority of those choices, we so instantly hide the memory of making that choice that we are not even aware of the process.
In addition, there isn’t just one dimension or universe; there is what I (and, I’ve recently discovered, numerous other people too) call the multiverse. (I thought I had come up with the term, and I had, but apparently many others have too. And after all, it <em>is</em> a very useful term.) And we aren’t stuck in just one of these multiverses; there is a lot of bleed-through and interaction between them, and we can move among them with some degree of freedom. Those that are closer to our current reality are easier to move toward and into; those that are further away take more time to move toward. When we make choices, we move ourselves in the direction of of a multiverse in which that choice is manifest.
Whether you want to call this a belief about reality or reality itself or fantasy is up to you. It is my experience that it is a true-enough belief about reality that one can find evidence for it if one looks. It also leads to some interesting ways of looking at reality.
For example, I introduced my daughter to Japanese anime some years back. Japanese anime is animation from Japan; the term covers a rather large range of art styles and themes. I had started watching in the late 1960s, when I would visit over at my-then-friend Cathy Hashimoto’s house. (I loved Speed Racer.) Later, the Studio Ghibli movies started coming out, almost all of which I also loved.
But when my daughter started watching, anime was, by no stretch of the word, big or popular in America. However, since then, anime and manga (Japanese graphic novels) have become immensely more popular, to the point where most people have at least been introduced to the concept or have even seen some, such as Spirited Away or Howl’s Moving Castle.
Although individual anime movies have had modest success compared with American animations, collectively, multiple millions of anime DVDs have sold in the US, with many more anime episodes, movies, and series (either available in the US or not) being downloaded from a wide variety of Web sites.
Now, one could argue that it is mere coincidence that anime has become increasingly more popular and available in the US at the same time that my daughter and I have become increasingly more interested in it.
However, one could also argue, and this is what I think is the truth, that, through our interest in anime, we (along with many other souls) have made numerous choices (both large and small) that have led us to move in the direction of a multiverse in which anime is more popular. This gives us more anime to watch; a good thing, if not necessarily of great spiritual consequence. (Though it can be.)
One natural consequence of this concept is that it does not allow for victims. There are none. From the wealthiest person alive to the poorest and most wretched, each person has exquisitely crafted his or her reality to be exactly what they choose to experience at any given moment. Consciously, many will deny that they chose such-and-such a reality. Many prefer instead to blame God and say that he “makes” things happen or that he “makes” people think, feel, say, or do things. Or, if they don’t blame God, they blame others—their parents, their teachers, society as a whole, their current love interest, their friends, their teachers, their employers—anyone but themselves—for where they are, what they are experiencing, and even what they are feeling, saying, and doing.
While on the face of things it can seem attractive to blame others, ultimately it still leaves us in a position from which we feel we cannot move without help, if at all. If we choose instead to believe that we have choices and that our choices led us to where we are, then we can also choose to start looking at our choices and see which ones we can make differently. Or, if nothing else, we can ask ourselves what soul purpose we are serving through having made the choices that led us to where we are right now. Do we have something we can only learn in this way? If so, what?
In addition to the Seth books cited above, an excellent resource for taking a more positive and proactive approach to creating our own realities (for we are doing it anyway, positively or not; we might as well do it positively), is the 15-minute miracle. In a nutshell, the 15-minute miracle workbook (called <em>My Miracle Manifestation Manual II</em>—the II actually means second edition, not volume II) provides daily pages for two months, each page of which is a fill-in-the-blanks personal meditation on creating a better reality. The woman who wrote these books says she turned around a bad marriage in less than 24 hours using these techniques; her husband, who had terminal cancer, was cancer-free in eight months; and their business, which was failing, is thriving. Miracles can happen; they are the result of a number of different spiritual energies coming together in a wonderful confluence of love. But they require you taking solme part in creating them at some level. So go create some of your own!
