The Nature of Personal Reality

This post is a review of the most empowering book I’ve ever read: The Nature of Personal Reality: Specific, Practical Techniques for Solving Everyday Problems and Enriching the Life You Know, by Jane Roberts (and Seth).

I finished reading it last week and just today finished transcribing the passages I doggy eared while using the best way to read a book. It took me several hours to take notes, which are mostly verbatim transcriptions of what I found to be the most valuable passages. These notes are almost a book in themselves: 17,457 words.

If you’ve read other book reviews on this site, you know one of my criteria of a book’s value is how many pages are doggy eared after finishing it. I realize the number of doggy ears below is a bit ridiculous, but have a look:

The Nature of Personal Reality is the second book in a series of six main Seth books. I reviewed the first one, Seth Speaks: The Eternal Validity of the Soul, here. While it was itself a fascinating, enlightening book, The Nature of Personal Reality is more practical and helpful. It not only discusses the nature of the reality in which we find ourselves currently, but gives specific, practical methods by which we can improve our life situations.

I can’t recommend this book highly enough. Reading and absorbing the ideas will improve your life to a large degree in whatever way you desire. Health, money, creativity, peace of mind, and moreover, joy and happiness. It could be the key for you to find true, lasting happiness. I mean it.

That said, it’s not easy reading, although it is entertaining. The language is simple enough, but the concepts involved are deep and may require some thought. Such is the nature of most things in life – generally speaking, the more worthwhile something is, the more effort is required.

If you aren’t aware, Seth is a personality, like you and me, but is not currently incarnated in our physical reality. Jane Roberts channels Seth during meditative trances, Seth speaks through her, and her husband, Robert Butts, transcribes what Seth/Jane says, word for word (along with some personal notes).

Throughout the book, Seth discusses the importance of our beliefs, how they shape our reality, and that each one of us, as an eternal consciousness currently experiencing creaturehood in human form, has complete power to create the reality we desire. Not only does he tell us that it’s possible, but he gives us specific practices we can use to create our desired reality.

I love this book.

Below are some of my favorite passages. To give you all of them would require, again, 17,457 words (and probably plagiarism), so you’ll have to settle for less than that. Please note that some of the concepts below can only be fully elucidated and understood in the context of the entire book.

“In a manner of speaking, the conscious mind is a window through which you look outward — and looking outward, perceive the fruits of your inner mind. Often you let false beliefs blur that great vision. Your joy, vitality and accomplishment do not come from outside to you as the result of events that “happen to you.” They spring from inner events that are the result of your beliefs.”

__________

“To believe in your own weakness is to deny yourself the power of action.”
__________

“Dreams are one of your greatest natural therapies, and one of your most effective assets as connectors between the interior and exterior universes.”

(It’s relevant to insert a plug here for the Lucid Dreaming Fast Track.)
__________

“You cannot appreciate your spirituality unless you appreciate your creature hood. It is not a matter of rising above your nature, but of evolving from the full understanding of it. There is a difference.

“You will not attain spirituality or even a happy life by denying the wisdom and experience of the flesh. You can learn more from watching the animals than you can from a guru or a minister — or from reading my book. But first you must divest yourselves of the idea that your creature hood is suspect. Your humanness did not emerge by refusing your animal heritage, but upon an extension of what it is.

“When you try to be spiritual by cutting off your creature hood you become less than joyful, fulfilled, satisfied natural creatures, and fall far short of understanding true spirituality.”
__________

“Any emotion will change into another if you experience it honestly. Otherwise you clog the natural movement of your entire system.”
__________

“When your ideas about yourself change, so does your experience.”
__________

“For an exercise, sit with your eyes wide open, looking about you, and realize that this moment represents the point of your power, through which you can affect both past and future events.

“The present seen before you, with its intimate physical experience, is the result of action in other such presents. Do not be intimidated therefore by the past or the future. There is no need at all for undesirable aspects of your contemporary reality to be projected into the future, unless you use the power of the present to do so.

“If you learn to get hold of this feeling of power now, you can use it most effectively to alter your life situation in whatever way you choose — again, within those limitations set by your creature hood.”
__________

“You are what you think, not what you eat — and to a large extent what you think about what you eat is far more important.

“What you think about your body, health, and illness will determine how your food is used, and how your chemistry handles fats, for instance, or carbohydrates. Your attitudes in preparing meals are highly important.

“Physically, it is true, but again generally speaking, that your body needs certain nourishments. But within that pattern there is great leeway, and the organism itself has the amazing capacity to make use of substitutes and alternates. The best diet in the world, by anyone’s standards, will not keep you healthy if you have a belief in illness.

“A belief in health can help you utilize a “poor” diet to an amazing degree. If you are convinced that a specific food will give you a particular disease, it will indeed do so. It appears that certain vitamins will prevent certain diseases. The belief itself works while you are operating within that framework, of course.”

(Scientific proof of this seemingly crazy idea can be found here.)
__________

“If you believe that wealth is evil, as an example, you automatically rob yourself of any ability that might bring you riches. Talents that are accepted as good in themselves may be inhibited simply because their fulfillment might lead to success in financial terms.

“Your beliefs then are highly important in the way in which you handle the power of personal action.”
__________

“Many churchgoers who consider themselves quite religious do not understand the nature of love or affirmation as much as some bar patrons, who celebrate the nature of their bodies and enjoy the spontaneous transcendence as they let themselves go with the motion of their beings.”

Those are just a scant few of the insightful passages of the book. If any of this seems interesting to you, or even if it doesn’t, I can’t recommend this book enough.

Read Amazon reviews of The Nature of Personal Reality here.