Preface to A Seth Workbook:Create Your Own happiness

Preface

For two months during the summer of 1984 I had a house guest who came from California to stay at my seaside cottage on Oahu's north shore and to work with me, using my soon-to-be published Seth work-book Create Your Own Reality as a focus. Every day we'd spend hours talking, sitting on the screened porch, each of us with a cat or two in our laps, looking out at the sparkling sea and crashing waves, as the cool trade winds swept around us.

　　Magna saw me as her mentor, but I didn't see her as my student, for certainly I learned as much from her as she did from me. She asked me many deep and challenging questions that tested to the limits my understanding of the Seth material and led to insights I wished I'd incorporated in my book. This woman had been intensely unhappy for most of her life (despite her intelligence, beauty, and talent) and was determined to change. We had met on the mainland a few months earlier and had felt an instant empathy with each other. When Magna began reading the manuscript of my book, she recognized that she was on to something—much as I had recognized in first reading the Seth material some ten years before that I was on to something. She then asked if she could study with me in the summer. I didn't have a new writing project going at the time and was glad to have her. It felt as if I'd shot my wad with Create Your Own Reality, for it had been a great challenge to distill from the complex and voluminous Seth material what I considered to be the most important concepts, to explain them clearly, and then to devise exercises that would implement those concepts. At the same time, I wanted very much to do more writing about the Seth philosophy, which I was continuing to find so valuable in my everyday personal life.

　　Each morning Magna wrote in her journal for a couple of hours；she did an exercise from one of the chapters of the book and described her reaction to it. Then we'd sit on the porch and talk. She was intellectually stimulated by the concepts and found the exercises useful in unearthing beliefs she had not been aware of. Like so many people I'd talked to about the Seth material, she found it difficult at first to accept its most basic principle：We totally create our own reality through the beliefs we hold. Like so many others before her in talking about some unfortunate past event, she would ask, “But why would I create a reality like that for myself?” Soon, though, after she began to discover some of the beliefs that she had about herself, she could see why.

    Magna could see that her reality was in keeping with the beliefs that she held. Basically those beliefs were that she was unworthy, helpless, and unattractive. She had “bought” these beliefs when growing up, and they were still operating even though she was now in her mid-thirties. Interestingly enough, Magna knew intellectually that none of these beliefs about her was “true,” but she still believed them. Her “rational” mind told her that it was nonsense to believe such things about herself, but her emotions (which are always generated by beliefs) told her otherwise.

　　Even so, there was a lot of comfort for Magna (as there had been for me and others I'd known) in really coming to see that her own beliefs had created her space-time experiences. Her beliefs were “unrealistic,” but at least they explained why she had gone through what she had. Before that revelation, she had not understood at all why she had failed so utterly to find happiness. All her life it had seemed to her that she was unlucky, that fate did not smile on her as it did, so inexplicably, on others. In coming to see that she had created what she had for herself through her beliefs, Magna gained a sense of control over her destiny that she had not felt before. She was not at the mercy of fate, only at the mercy of her beliefs.

　　So then Magna was ready for the next step—to get rid of those beliefs she didn't like, which had created a reality of unhappiness, and to replace them with beliefs that would create a happier reality for herself. And it was at this stage that she balked. I was not surprised, for other people I'd worked with had, over time, come to accept the idea that they were responsible for creating their own reality and that their beliefs determined what that reality would be. They really came to see this clearly. But when it came to getting rid of any of their beliefs, they resisted. For a while this puzzled me until I finally came to see that, for the most part, people tend to regard their beliefs as an essential part of their identity：Their beliefs are who they are；they are their beliefs. In other words, they can't get rid of their beliefs without getting rid of themselves. Self-annihilation!

　I had tried to get these people to see beliefs in a different light by using Seth's analogy, which compares beliefs to furniture that can be rearranged or thrown out at will. But this didn't seem to help in most cases, perhaps because furniture is so obviously physical and beliefs are so obviously not physical (until their results appear in space-time reality). They still continued to see their beliefs as themselves. And so, like Magna, the people I'd worked with might accept intellectually the idea of changing beliefs, but emotionally they resisted it (because of their belief that they would annihilate themselves). And I didn't know what to do about this. It seemed to me another analogy was needed. As it turned out, Magna was the one to provide it.

　　One day we were discussing an exercise she had just done, and, as had happened many times before, she'd discovered some beliefs that she hadn't been aware of. But, as usual, instead of being glad that she had finally brought these beliefs to light, she got down on herself for having had them to begin with. As she had done many times before, Magna used the discoveries she had made in doing the exercise not as a means of changing herself but as yet another way of supporting the old beliefs she had about herself, “proving” that she was unworthy by having the beliefs. Exasperated, I pointed this out to her. Emotionally, she responded, ‘‘I just can't help it, Nancy. I'm habituated to unhappiness!”

　　We looked at each other and our faces simultaneously lit up. We both knew a breakthrough in understanding had occurred. We hadn't seen the situation in quite that light before. Of course, once we did see it, it seemed so obvious, as all truths do：What Magna thought about herself, that is, the beliefs she held that led to her feeling unhappy, were nothing more than habits. Habits of mind. She was habituated to unhappiness. How could it be, I thought to myself, that I had never before viewed beliefs in quite this manner——as habits?

　　The perspective was so useful because everyone knows what habits are. Everyone has habits. Furthermore, everyone knows that habits are not who they are: Habits are not them，but something they do. And finally everyone knows that habits can be changed with determined effort. Everyone has experienced habits and has experienced changing habits, so they know for sure that changing habits does not at all annihilate their personhood, although it does change their reality in some way. A perfect analogy! Especially since, unlike furniture, many habits are not physical at all, but mental, just as beliefs are mental. For instance, a friend once told me amusedly that when driving he was in the habit of mentally counting cars that were the same make as his own. He didn't know when he got into that habit, but now, every time he drove he mentally took note of each Colt he saw along the way. He even told me he had seen eight the day before, and that his record was fifty-six Colts spotted during an extended drive.

　　All of us have such “quirks”——mental habits we are aware of to varying degrees, which we may find amusing, as my friend did with his car-counting habit, or which we may find annoying. And if we find one that is annoying enough, we make an effort to stop doing it. I remember that a couple of years ago I realized I'd somehow got into the habit every weekday morning when I woke up of mentally going through the actions involved in getting myself out of the house and on the way to my teaching job at the university. “Get up. Brush teeth. Put on turquoise pants and lavender top....” One day, I could see that I was boring myself with this mental routine and decided to stop doing it. The next morning I automatically started in on my internal recitation, caught myself doing it, and stopped. The next day the same thing happened. Within a week I had wiped out what had become an annoying, if harmless, mental habit.

　　Beliefs are a type of mental habit, a habitual way of thinking about the world. As mental habits, they are not who we are but rather something we do, mental actions we take, expressions we habitually choose. These habits of thought, then, like other mental or physical habits can be changed without affecting who we are while certainly affecting the reality we create for ourselves. For instance, once Magna had got past the hurdle of totally identifying with her beliefs, she made phenomenal progress in getting rid of those beliefs/habits that led to the creation of unhappiness for herself and replacing them with beliefs/habits that led to the creation of happiness. Her life has changed dramatically, and she is much happier now than she used to be. Still, she remains Magna. Rather than annihilating her selfhood through these changes, she has expanded, become more herself than she had ever dreamed she could be.

　　I hope this book will have the same effect on you. Or, rather, that in going through this book and doing the exercises and practicing the “Habits of Happiness” at the end of each chapter, you will create for yourself a happier, more expanded reality than you now have. It is up to you to do the work；this book cannot do it for you. But I hope it can inspire and motivate you to do the necessary work/play involved in self-searching and self-changing. To that end I have included a lot of personal examples from my life and the lives of people I've known, which I hope will show you that you are not alone. I think each person tends to feel he or she is the only one who has been through certain things, the only one who has reacted in such a way to a given situation. And, although it is true that each of us is unique, viewing the world from his or her own center, it is also true that we are all interconnected, united in our desire to learn and to grow and to see what our beliefs look like when dramatized in three-dimensional reality. We are all in this together, and the more aware we become of the beliefs under which others operate, the more aware we become of our own similar (or dissimilar) beliefs.

We create our own reality, whether we like it or not. I hope to make it clear that if you don't like some aspect of your reality, you can change it. Actually, you are always changing in any case, for that's what “life” is all about. But you can learn to have more conscious control over the changes you experience and the resulting realities created than you presently have. It is all a matter of bringing to conscious awareness those beliefs/habits of mind you have that result in realities you are not happy with and then replacing these beliefs/habits with others that create realities you are happy with. Earlier I gave you the example of the annoying mental habit I had of rehearsing every minute action before getting up in the morning. Like most habits, this one was invisible to me at first--I did not give it my conscious attention. And I would have had that habit to this day if I hadn't finally attended to it. What helped to draw my attention to it was an uncomfortable feeling, which I soon identified as boredom. I associated this discomfort with the mental habit, which gave me the motivation to stop doing it. But stopping took some practice, because it had become automatic for me to think that way in that situation—my habit wasn't a conscious process. I had to be on the alert for that automatic response, ready to notice it, so that I could then consciously stop it, nip it in the bud.

　　It is the same way with beliefs. You have to notice them before you can change them, and very often your feeling of discomfort will provide the first clue to the belief. Identifying the emotion (or，in other cases, the action, or the memory, or something else) will lead to identifying the belief. And once you see that, you are on your way. It is then a process of being alert to that belief/habit and of practicing with other potential beliefs/habits that you can see will create a more enjoyable reality for yourself. It is really quite a simple procedure, if not always easy：We are complex entities with many “parts” to ourselves and with many (sometimes conflicting) beliefs operating.

　　The more you can accept yourself as you are in each moment, the more open you will be to change—the more open you will be to accepting new beliefs about yourself that will expand your horizons. Conversely, the more you get down on yourself for having certain habits of mind (as Magna did at first), the more you will impede your progress—the more you will reject new beliefs about yourself that could change your life for the better. It may seem paradoxical, but self-acceptance is the key to change. You have to believe here and now that you're okay in order to believe that it is okay for you to have more, to be happy. That's why so many of the habits in this book are devoted to various forms of self-acceptance.

　　I genuinely wish you all success and happiness and evermore expansive realities. Have fun!

                                 ——Guerneville, California, 1988