By Gabriel Hartley
INTRO: I wrote the following beginnings of an essay in the middle of 2016 before the U.S. Democratic National Convention. I was intrigued then, as now, in the ways in which the narratives concerning the various candidates didn’t simply reflect the true nature of those candidates as living individuals but in fact created the various caricatures that matched the predispositions of varying opposed audiences. But what I discovered through my meditations on the messages from Seth (see below for an introduction to this entity) was that the distinction between “true nature” and “caricature” as stated above is itself a caricature. This is because we always live within the terms of realities that we ourselves create—even those meta-realities that allow us to speak about meta-realities, and so on. I plan to develop these notions in much greater detail over time, but I found this meditation from four years ago just as potent for me now during the current 2020 presidential race as it was in 2016. And no, we are not done with the debacle of 2016 (as many people anxiously desire) nor have we learned our lessons from that moment in the creation of social reality. So . . .
Whose Hillary? Whose Bernie? Whose Trump?
It is mid-July 2016 and I find myself amazed yet again at the stunning array of alternate American realities that continue to arise from the public political scene. Perhaps more than in any other Presidential primary season I have lived through (I was born in 1957), this season has illustrated the mantra of Seth, the disembodied “energy personality” channeled for over twenty years by Jane Roberts, claiming that “You create your own reality.”
I’ve been saying this for years. I pointed out during Barack Obama’s first run for the Presidency, for example, that the Obama phenomenon was so perfect because his “message” was so vague, based primarily on empty slogans and catchwords such as “change” and “hope.” After eight years of George W. Bush, many American voters were ready for “change.” And almost every progressive I knew was euphoric about the promise of hope and change that Obama claimed to offer. But what kind of change was Obama actually suggesting? The beauty of his campaign was that he never exactly said. He left the slogans as open as possible. For after all, who can be against “hope”?
The ultra-right, of course, created their own fantastical Obama—the African-born Muslim socialist who was bent on destroying all that was ever good about America. To them he promised to establish secret FEMA camps for locking away good, honest, gun-carrying whites who simply wanted to celebrate their presumed Constitutionally-derived privileges that would assure that their anti-LGBTQ, anti-abortion, anti-woman, anti-immigrant brand of Christianity would continue in its ascendency.
Now, I could argue here that the objective factual record of Obama’s actual behavior as president proved both the progressives and the reactionaries to be delusional and that Obama was, instead, neither the savior nor the destroyer of what the Nation holds most sacred but rather the upholder of the status quo. Drones in Pakistan, bailed-out bankers in New York, American troops throughout the Middle East, Black men shot in the streets by police—in what ways did his record differ from that of the Bushes before him, or from Bill Clinton’s, for that matter?
But here I am proposing a thesis that I believe is far more radical, more rooted in the basic realities we face: All three of these Obamas did in fact exist! The euphoric Progressive, the rabid Reactionary, and the cynical Leftist each in their own way created the Obama that best fit their own belief structure and emotional framework for interpreting the nature of the social experiment we all participate in. For these three Obamas, as well as a host of more variously nuanced versions, each are creations of the consciousnesses that dreamed them into being. In this context, then, it is beside the point to try to seek the “real” Obama—simply because all of these Obamas have had equally real existences in the imaginations of those who created and sustained them. And this is the radical outcome of taking Seth at his word: “You create your own reality.” You—each of you alone and all of you together—create the political figure that you believe you need at the moment.
The truth is that we each create, individually and en masse, the political realities that we perceive. Whether we love or despise Bernie or Hillary or Trump, we each have created our own version of them for our own purposes, consciously or (more likely) not. We each have created a variety of universes in which these figures play vastly different and often contradictory roles. I suggest that the key question, then, is this: Which figure do we wish to create and for which self-created universe?
The Fundamentals of Creation
Before going into more detail concerning the 2016 Presidential primary season, I want to provide a conceptual overview of Seth’s statements regarding exactly how we create the multiple “probable” universes that we do. Perhaps the second most important claim of Seth’s following “You create your own reality” is that “You are a multidimensional personality” (Nature of Personal Reality 130). “I have used the word multidimensional often,” Seth points out, “and you see I mean it quite literally, for your reality exists not only in terms of reincarnational existences but also in the probable realities mentioned earlier” (Seth Speaks 166). This multidimensional self that Seth refers to is what he means when he speaks of the soul, which is “upheld, supported, maintained by the energy, the inconceivable vitality, of All That Is” (Seth Speaks 207), which is what Seth means when he speaks of the multidimensional God. As such multidimensional beings, we exist as multiple “probable selves” in multiple “probable realities” simultaneously. No given probable reality, including the one we imagine as our reality here and now in this three-dimensional idea of physical space and time, is any more real than any other, for each is equally real. So the slogan “You create your own reality” ultimately means that “You create all of your simultaneous realities.”
Passages from THE INDIVIDUAL AND THE NATURE OF MASS EVENTS
“You form your own reality. If you are tired of having me stress that point, I can only say that I hope the repetition will serve to make you understand that the statement applies to the most minute and the most important of the events that you experience” (99).
51 En masse, your private beliefs form your cultural reality.
67 Your private beliefs merge with those of others, and form your cultural reality.
254 Those natural impulses, followed, will automatically lead to political and social organizations that become both tools for individual development and implements for the fulfillment of the society.
Begin where you are 255
265 a powerful drive within the species for creativity, and for the fulfillment of values
272 powered by the energy of the universe. It actually springs into being in each moment.
291 impulse to be
292 do not overemphasize the gap
296 [The] inner self, which is the source of your present being, speaks through your impulses.
TOPICS
epidemics & inoculations
qualities of life: (23) joy, zest, cooperation, self-respect, trust, integrity; (67) optimism, ever-abundant energy to grow, curiosity, creativity; (244) altruism; (258) goodness; (303) tolerance, compassion, humor, good intent
inner & outer weather
mass meditations
bleed-throughs
time
flu season
Science-Christianity
Psyche
Myth
inner power-self-reality-ego
Frameworks 1, 2, & 3
Creativity
Meeting of Inner & Outer Egos: Psychological Chamber
Reason/Intuition-Feelings
Impulses
Electromagnetic Properties
Imagination
The Christ Drama
Christianity-Darwin-Freud/Seth
Paranoia
American Experiment: Democracy vs. Darwinism
Idealism
Fanatics
Nationalistic Fantasies
Organized Action
Gap (idealized good/exaggerated evil)
Three Mile Island, Jonestown, Watergate
Impulse Choice Change
Dreams
Competition
Value Fulfillment
Practicing Idealist
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