My reply to Seth (entity channeled by Jane Roberts)

Puzzled that I missed that for so long, while I had checked and criticized Walsch's purported (fake) "Conversations with God" which was best seller when I was searching just after my deconversion from Christianity. But since I stumbled on your amazing story of creation which echoed some of the concepts I had developed myself on the foundations of mathematics and the metaphysical foundations of physics I had to catch up.

"...I can quite literally be called a ghost writer (...) I address an unseen audience. However, I know that my readers exist, and therefore I shall ask each of them, now, to grant me the same Privilege."

Some people even reportedly saw your stuff as the most mind-blowing stuff out there on this planet. I understand them, but I personally wouldn't go that far. I mean it may be a correct assessment in that particular field, that is, the field of metaphysics (compared to other "channels" and the teachings of existing religions), but I personally had other opportunities to have my mind blown by works in other fields (and of course I may have missed more existing mind-blowing works, as I'm not an erudite and I felt discouraged of trying to be one by the dominating dullness around); I will come back on that later.
For now let me just mention one on the "opposite side" of that very field : the arguments of the atheist blogger Greta Christina against Christianity and other religions and spiritualities. In that way, which some of your followers might see as paradoxical, she did also genuinely fulfill the very purpose which you insisted we are all here for on this planet : that of developing our skills, personality and creativity, each in our own ways in our lives; and also contributed to some growth of the personalities of her readers. While her work may be read as arguments against all spiritualist metaphysics at all, it also makes sense as signals of genuine challenges that spirituality needs to work on. For example, her remark on "The failure of religion to improve or clarify over time". Isn't there ? I know that you have your whole original conception of "spiritual progress", that it does not have to look linear, and remains somewhat different from our usual conception of progress as we experience in science and technology, but...

1. Your Material came not as a fruit of anyone's spiritual research, but from your unilateral decision to fall on Jane by surprise (so what the f**k could be the value of all the energy invested by all the devout monks, mystics and other praying people of the world in their "quest for wisdom" if the wisest teachings turned out to fall on us by such completely unrelated channels ? I wonder).
2. From a superficial viewpoint your contribution may be viewed as adding to the confusion, since you contradict with your teachings much of the usual ones carried by the most widespread religions, therefore invalidating much of the supposed value of what millions of religious people had given their life to, at least since 2 millenia. Of course letting a good stuff appear where there was none is a kind of progress. But what a modest one climbing from such a terrible previous state of affairs, in contrast with so many people's optimistic view of the whole field. (I am obviously not here intending to deny optimism in an absolute sense but only relative to the specific human perspective, namely in the sense given by Mellen-Thomas Benedict’s NDE, which I see as fully coherent with your teachings, that is "I asked God, "What is the best religion on the planet? Which one is right?" And Godhead said, with great love, "I don't care." That was incredible grace. (...) I immediately understood that it is for us to care about. It is important, because we are the caring beings.")
3. I have no impression of significant further progress of human spirituality since the publication of your books. Instead, the large majority of "new agers" seemed to switch their attention to works of lower quality, such as those of Walsch already mentioned.
4. Finally, I would even question the quality of some aspects of your Material itself, as I'll develop in the rest of this review.

"... this material with all my best efforts, and with yours (Rob & Jane), of necessity must contain distortions merely in order to make itself exist at all on your plane. I will never condone an attitude in which either you or Ruburt maintain that you hold undiluted truth through these sessions. Any material, to exist on your plane, must to some extent don the attire of your plane, and in the very entry to your plane it must be somewhat distorted. I must use phrases with which your minds are somewhat familiar. I must use Ruburt's subconscious to some degree. If I did not take advantage of your own camouflage system, then YOU would not be able to understand the material at this time. Inner data, even this, MUST make its entry through some distortion. We must always work together, but you must never consider me as an infallible source. This material is more valid than any material possible on your plane, but it is nevertheless to some degree conditioned by the camouflage attributes of the plane. "

"I come here because it is fun. I have fun when I come here. I do not come here because I feel that I have any great responsibility for your beings or welfare. Who am I to set myself against the innate wisdom of your own individual being, or to take upon my invisible shoulders the great privilege or joyful responsibility for your behavior and destiny ?"

1. Does the latter proposition actually contradict the former or not (or its actually intended meaning) ? which the participants might not be at clear with, as your actually intended meaning could escape them.
2. Can the latter proposition be also true, or eventually even better than the former ? If it was, this would actually contradict the claim that the former proposition was "more valid than any material possible"

• You may be trying to mislead us. But I would not really see the point, so let us ignore this possibility for the sake of a brotherly discussion, as we have much more interesting other ideas than this to explore anyway.
  
• You may have had in mind that, of necessity, you also needed to add to your Material some bullshit, such as some absurd despise against science, for the sake of motivating some bunches of bullshit lovers and science haters around to spread the word about it, for fear of otherwise leading your whole Material to being quickly wiped out from public attention, thus not sustain significant existence in our plane. Indeed, in a first time I was puzzled by the contrast between the high interest I found in actually reading in length some of your stuff (especially Seth speaks and some other important excerpts), and the quite terrible, bullshit-oriented headlines of hype and superstitious self-interest characterizing the aspects or interpretations of your Material put forward by those trying to commercialize it (especially the "Seth learning center") who try their best to make it look as interesting as they can for people to buy it. Finally I found they genuinely got most of that crap from your second book The Nature of personal reality, which seems full of it (and which I only browsed through later, shortly after I read someone found it much "deeper" and more "interesting" than Seth speaks). Then I must admit the possibility that indeed, rubbish may be all what most people are actually looking for (they can only see something "interesting" if it looks like a giant carrot), so that you had to offer it for this reason. In this case I do understand that of necessity you could not disclose this inner dimension of your disclaimer. Well played, dude.
• You may be actually ignorant or mistaken on some issues. After all, no one is omniscient. Anyone's abilities and experiences, even very wide, can still be subject to partiality. Your very large experience and your focus on some specific people may still leave some gaps and biases in your perspective, letting you offer them teachings which may be suitable for them, or which would be suitable if they resembled you, but may not be suitable for all. Your playful insistence on people's risks of limiting themselves by their way of sticking to their unquestioned beliefs and assumptions does not protect you from the risk of having yourself fallen in a similar trap, so that even without noticing, your particular ways of suggesting specific works and possibilities may turn out to divert your readers from other possibilities which you ignore but may actually be better accessible or profitable to some. You may underestimate the difficulty for some people to do things which feel easy to you, and ignore other possible cases of backgrounds or opportunities of development which you may be less familiar with. You may illusion yourself, mistaking your beliefs for reality in some cases where reality check would require skills you are less familiar with, such as skills of scientific methods.
• The limits of expressibility of human language are not fixed once for all but may actually vary between people and in time. In particular, mathematics and physics come with their own language by which some sophisticated concepts can be communicated but only a minority of humans have the skills to handle it. Actually, some of your descriptions are suggesting implicit references to that style of concepts, therefore yearning for underlying mathematical details, which you failed to provide.

On science

"Some personalities, therefore, have never been physical. (...) In some systems for example, [consciousness] forms highly integrated mathematical and musical patterns that are themselves stimuli for other universal systems. I am not very well acquainted with these, however, and cannot speak of them with any great familiarity".

" My environment, now, is not the one in which you will find yourself immediately after death. I cannot help speaking humorously, but you must die many times before you enter this particular plane of existence. (Birth is much more of a shock than death...) My work in this environment provides far more challenge than any of you know, and it also necessitates the manipulation of creative materials that are nearly beyond your present comprehension. (...) In my environment you would be highly disoriented, for it would seem to you as if it lacked coherency. "

Now one may argue against the relevance of this comparison of value, precisely by the lack of accessibility of mathematical works, while the design of your work was visibly bound by the constraint (which you took on yourself but whose justifications I remain doubtful of), to make all of it accessible to a wider audience (as far as it could be publicized, which decades later turned out to be a major limit). Indeed it is such a pity to see those wonderful realms of mathematics still only visible to so few people. This is why I undertook to develop my web site on the foundations of mathematics and physics to provide to a larger audience, as far as possible, a much more direct access to some of the most amazing gems from those fields.
As for the quality of your material, considering that my patience reading much of Seth Speaks might have been still insufficient to grasp the depth of the more complete message you intended to provide, I took the time to read further, especially browsing through a number of pages of The Unknown Reality which was supposedly deeper and wider in its exploration of reality with less obsession than The Nature of personal reality on issues of supposedly more direct personal interests. But reading many pages still did not succeed to give me much to discover, think about, decide to agree or disagree. Comparing this with how some pure mathematics texts I happened to look through could get my mind blown by amazing new concepts at every page, or even paragraph, I must consider your work rather disappointing.
I was dismayed by your way of spending pages there ranting against the value of modern science in general, and of mathematical skills in particular, and telling nonsense about the conditions for theoretical science. This rather looks like an ignorant despise against science and mathematical intelligence. What do you really know about it ? How could you miss the fact that modern science is actually the best illustration of your main message, that thoughts create reality, and more precisely, scientific thoughts are among the most powerful ones for changing and creating the world in which we live ? I turned out to be very clear witness of these conditions and values of theoretical science after extremely careful exploration and checking (so necessary for me as conditions to dare contradicting the so widespread antiscientific "spiritual wisdom" around).
You can have a lot of experience with many realities, and in the physical one with the lives of thousands of people, this still does not qualify you in reaching a proper understanding about the place of science and the best ways for humans to do it, because this field has only few good representatives down here, with whom you seem unfamiliar.
Perhaps, too much familiarity with lay people who hate maths because of how bothering and boring it feels at school, may have misled you. Likewise, you could be just making an honest mistake due to your particular perspective which you once told a word about. I understand that while browsing through the world you could stumble on a number of "unofficial scientists" in your terms, i.e. cranks, and fall into the trap of sympathizing too much with their paranoid, self-delusional endeavors where they imagined that they were doing better science than real scientists (so you mistake them as the "true" scientists which they fancy to be), just using "intuition", dismissing mathematical skills. You could not dare to figure out that all their works and convictions may have been nothing more than a huge... accident.

Or, I understand your rants could help a lot to get your Material popular across a large public of proudly ignorant people and science haters, but this is neither lucid nor respectful towards the real values of these fields.
No wonder, then, why your work could not reach respectability in the eyes of the minority of the more serious thinkers and scientists who are known (for good reasons, such as their success on a free market whose working principles ensure at least a partial rooting of success on reality rather than mistaken ideology) as making the more useful contributions to the progress of our world.

Among these are authors of mind-blowing works, whose existence I am aware of, though I am not really familiar with them : Milnor's works on topology ; quantum field theory ; Cohen's concept of forcing in set theory, as used in the proof of independence of the continuum hypothesis. (The concept of supersymmetry is also mind-blowing, but remains speculative for physics);

"If Einstein had been a better mathematician, he would not have made the breakthroughs that he did. He would have been too cowed. Yet even then his mathematics did hold him back, and put a kink in his intuitions. Often you take it for granted that intuitive knowledge is not practical, will not work, or will not give you diagrams. Those same diagrams of which science is so proud, however, can also be barriers, giving you a dead instead of a living knowledge. Therefore, they can be quite impractical." —UR1 Section 3: Session 701 June 3, 1974
"Einstein traveled within, and trusted, his own intuitions, and used his inner senses. He would have discovered much more had he been able to trust his intuitions even more, and able to leave more of the so-called scientific proof of his theories to lesser men, to give himself more inner freedom." —TES2 Session 45 April 20, 1964"

There is no sense trying to oppose intuition to proof. Mathematical expressions (proofs...) are no way a matter of lesser men, but they are the amazing adventure across some higher realities. In mathematical research, intuition is with respect to proof just what, in your terms, wish and desire are with respect to actualization, so they are necessary to each other. According to the Myers–Briggs Type Indicator, intuition comes in the I/S opposition, and means global view (as opposed to sensing which means focusing on details), and is independent from the T/F dimension (rational thinking vs. feelings as a basis for judgement).

Special Relativity also had co-discoverers. Einstein's role there was mainly to popularize it, and this had adverse effects as it was done too early, before Minkowski gave a better mathematical formulation. Now this Einstein's focus on "intuitions" at the expense of proper mathematics, and his popularity, had quite terrible long-term consequences, because of the bad habit of physics teachers to passively copy their courses on official references instead of doing the serious work of finding the really best mathematical formalism. And by the fault of Einstein's excessive popularity, they took the bad habit of copying (the inspiration for) their Special Relativity courses from Einstein's book on Relativity. I had read that book myself at the age of 13 and struggled about 1 year through its formulas until I "discovered" that they could be greatly simplified... a well-known secret among theoretical physicists who know pretty well that all so-called mathematical formulas of Special Relativity (the Lorentz transformation formulas, which are the main fuss of Einstein's book) turn out to be completely useless and in dire need to be un-learned when entering the realm of the relativity-based theories of physics (General Relativity, relativistic mechanics and relativistic view of electromagnetism, and quantum field theory). This poor quality I found in Einstein's book on Relativity, along my initiation to theoretical physics, comes in contrast especially with Lev Landau's book on Classical Theory of Fields, which I had the chance to be advised to read, and was great to get a clear unified understanding of relativistic mechanics and electromagnetism in their tensorial formalism.
Yet physics teachers keep their habit of teaching Special Relativity in Einstein's way. What it looks like : first making a fuss about so-called "intuitions" about space and time and supposedly transcendental principles to which any laws of physics, whatever may be, should be subjected with respect to super-stuff called "inertial frames of reference" (whose existence is actually denied by General Relativity...). Then spend the rest of work persecuting the intuitions of space and time we started with by going through some very complicated and non-intuitive mathematical formulas. Namely in the course of Special Relativity I followed at ENS Ulm (the most prestigious French scientific teaching institution), the teacher kept repeating over and over again along his course how counter-intuitive all this stuff was, as if that counter-intuitiveness was something to be proud of.

As opposed to the physicist Einstein's formulation of Special Relativity, the one brought by the mathematician Minkowski (see my own introduction to Relativity) meant, altogether and equivalently, more appropriate and natural intuition (one 4D geometry instead of distinct intuitions for time and space), better mathematics in the sense of better choice of mathematical formalism, much simpler formulas (looking as if it was "less mathematical"... in the eyes of non-mathematicians) and easier mathematical proofs. Because it is mathematically simpler, more intuitive and more logical to express a theory (Special Relativity) in its right own formalism, that is, in terms of its own directly meaningful concepts, than in the intuition and formalism of some other theory (Galilean space-time). Here at least, a choice of intuition is equivalent to a choice of mathematical formalism (the choice of the stuff supposed to make sense, to be given names as symbols used in the formalism).

As opposed to this, the interpretation of quantum physics which naturally accepts the fundamental role of consciousness to create reality (which became a minority because of lack of current representatives and the misunderstanding of its relation to the later discovered concept of quantum decoherence) is called the Von Neumann-Wigner interpretation. Clearly Von Neumann and Eugene Wigner were great mathematicians. Von Neumann was co-discoverer, together with Lev Landau, of the definition of quantum state as "density matrix", and of its entropy (thus called the Von Neumann entropy), which are the implicit basis of my introduction to quantum physics focusing on the relevant aspects for the measurement problem and the debate on interpretations.

Accidents and fallacies

"If you accept the possibility of the slightest, smallest, most insignificant accident, then indeed you open a Pandora's Box, for logically, there cannot be simply one small accident in that case but a universe in which accidents are not the exception but the rule. A universe in which, therefore, following logic..."

"[conciousness] has within it infinite sources of creativity, unlimited possibilities of development. But it has yet to learn the means of actualization, and must find within itself ways to bring into existence those untold creations that are within it. Therefore it creates varieties of conditions in which to operate, and sets itself challenges, some doomed to failure in your terms, at least initially, because it must first create the conditions which will bring new creations about."

1. There is no reason why a perfect correspondence should always be even conceivable between the list of options of the one and the list of options of the other.
2. An even bigger trouble, is that for such a supernatural matching system between probable realities to possibly work, the split of possibilities for one individual should occur simultaneously to the split of possibilities for the other. But the chances for this simultaneity condition to be satisfied are essentially zero.

Unknown reality : "People will die when they are ready to, following inner dictates and dynamics. A person ready to die will, despite any medication. (...) The dynamics of health has nothing to do with inoculations. They reside in the consciousness of each being."

Quote: "The over-population problem will teach you that if you do not have a loving concern for the environment in which you dwell, it will no longer sustain you..."

(Seth Speaks) "[after death] you learn to understand how your experiences were the result of your own thoughts and emotions and how these affected others"

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"Your world is not in dire straits because you trust yourselves, but precisely because you do not. Your social institutions are set up to fence in the individual, rather than to allow the natural development of the individual!"

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"In those terms there was a point where consciousness impressed itself into matter through intent, or formed itself into matter. That ‘breakthrough’ cannot be logically explained, but only compared to, say, an illumination – that is, a light everywhere occurring at once, that became a medium for life in your terms. It had nothing to do with the propensity of certain kinds of cells to reproduce, but with an overall illumination that set the conditions in which life as you think of it was possible – and at that imaginary hypothetical point, all species became latent."
session 797 "Your universe did not emerge at any one point, therefore, or with any one initial cell – but everywhere it began to exist at once, as the inner pulsations of the invisible universe reached certain intensities that “impregnated” the entire physical system simultaneously. In this case, first of all light appeared. At the same time EE (electromagnetic energy) units became manifest, impinging from the invisible universe into definition. "

" "Your whole civilization is immersed with the idea that the way to solve a problem -- any problem, private or worldwide -- is to exaggerate it, see its worst projection; and this, then, is suposed to make you take proper action. The approach unfortunately solves no problems, and only compounds them, whether the nation is trying to solve problems of energy, or social problems, or whether an individual is try to overcome a dilemma. You are so immersed in that method of problem solving, however, that it comes back to haunt you. At least you can be aware of it and alert. I will give you the answers to your questions, but they are not the way to solve your problem -- and against all conventional knowledge, reviewing the mistakes of the past does not lead to wisdom. When you become so worried, of course, you concentrate even further on the problem -- how bad it is, and what will happen if it becomes worse in the future....The belief is that if you frighten yourself badly enough through imagined projections and imagination, you will be frightened enough to change -- but the nation or the individual following that method does not change for the better, but compounds the original condition, concentrates upon it until it looms larger than before. Such methods cause panic, national or individual. ...Against all that conventional wisdom, what I have said sounds extremely simple, simplistic, Pollyannaish, until you try to do it. To solve a problem you begin to minimize its characteristics, diminish its importance, rob it of your attention, refuse it your energy. The method is the opposite, of course, of what you are taught. That is why it seems to be so impractical. "

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