(December 19, 1972)
Look at the Christmas tree; your cells and molecules shine a million times more brightly.
Your eyes glitter with far greater light. You are love in corporeal form. You do not have
to look for it or wonder where to find it or give it in packages with bright ribbon.
You are packages with bright ribbon.
Excerpt:
Christmas is now and was yesterday and will be tomorrow. It is in you, in Buddha, in Pan, in Christ, in Mohammed, in an ant and in a frog, and in your eyes and with you, each of you. You are each, then, Christmas. You shine and glitter whether or not you know it. You shout “Merry Christmas” even when you cry. You cannot deny your own vitality or being.
Message:
Do not think that Christmas is too camp. In your civilization, when you allow it to, it speaks to the child in you. Accept the child and enjoy the myth, for behind the myth there is truth, and the truth is that you are reborn. And the truth is that the inner self does have the wonder of a child.
Other stories have been wound about those truths, but the truths remain. The god Pan has as great a validity as Christ has. The names change; the stories change to fit your ideas and your civilization. Now, I prefer Pan piping his magic flutes over the countryside and drinking wine, to a Christ born to be crucified. But that is my idea; you pick your own.
Behind all the myths is the reality. You are born with the wonder of a child again to remake the world in a new image. Christmas should represent the rebirth of the self. Seth Speaks should be called You Speak. So listen to yourselves.
It is fashionable to think in terms of Buddha and Eastern religions. And it is not fashionable to think of the infant Christ, for example. So you are “in” if you think of Buddha, and “out” if you dare to let a tear show when they play a Christmas carol. The same thing is involved. You are still dealing with systems of beliefs and myths that have grown through the ages. And each of them has their degree of validity and their degree of distortion.
Santa Claus — Ho Ho — is relatively harmless considering what your religions have done. If you are bad you get a hunk of coal, and if you are good you get a goody. But what about a god who says if you are good you will go to heaven and if you are bad you burn through all eternity? Place your indignation where it belongs!
All of the gods in your myths die and are rewarded—from the time of your ancient memory, and through the ages of the memory of your race. So it is simply said again and again, in terms that you understand, according to the time in which you think you live: That you are born again and again, and the trials of the gods are your own, and so are their triumphs and their joys.
The symbols used are also colored by the times, and they are personified, so winter and the cold that sweeps across the earth are used to symbolize the death of the soul. Not a death, however, but transformation. If you understood your myths, you could use them effectively. When you think that they are reality, however, they can entrap you.
You are the stories that the soul tells. You are your own stories, and you create your ideas of God according to your interpretation of greater realities that you understand and do not understand. You are catching up with your own understanding, but as soon as you understand, there is more to learn because creativity is never still and never done and never finished.
In other worlds there are other Christmas tales, each with their own story and rhyme. But none of them denies the intense and eternal NOW which is being forever created and in which you have your quite natural existence. And none of it denies the joyful vitality that is your own, neither the bewilderment in your eye, nor the pleasure in yours. All of this is meant to illuminate the joy and ease of your own being, and meant to generate within you, if you will forgive me, that old Ho Ho Ho, the vitality and the laughter and the joy that is your being. If you understood thoroughly what I am trying to say to you, you would be laughing with me and enjoying your own grizzly beard and hair, and, as you looked around at each other, you would see yourselves as all ages, reborn time and time again and with your identity alive within you now.
The truth is not something apart from you. You each are truth, speaking and living in physical form. Seth Speaks is within you and not in a book. You are the book. Then joyfully listen to what your feelings tell you. Your thoughts and your feelings are both natural and both yours. And your joy is within you, Christmas or non-Christmas, Santa Claus or no Santa Claus, December 25 or the 4th of July. Your atoms and molecules shout with the joy of their own being; listen to them. Feel within their fleshy substance your own spirituality.
Look at the Christmas tree; your cells and molecules shine a million times more brightly. Your eyes glitter with far greater light. You are love in corporeal form. You do not have to look for it or wonder where to find it or give it in packages with bright ribbon. You are packages with bright ribbon.
Christmas is now and was yesterday and will be tomorrow. It is in you, in Buddha, in Pan, in Christ, in Mohammed, in an ant and in a frog, and in your eyes and with you, each of you. You are each, then, Christmas. You shine and glitter whether or not you know it. You shout “Merry Christmas” even when you cry. You cannot deny your own vitality or being.
Let the vitality and energy, therefore, ring out through your own knowledge. Let it awaken within you the knowledge of your being. Dance through your own molecules and scatter your own petals! And I bid you all a merry Christmas!
(ESP Class Session, December 19, 1972)
There were a few remarks that I intended to make concerning the Christmas season, and perhaps I should make them now.
If it seems to you that there is a great gap existing within Christianity, between ideals expressed, and actions, then let me tell you that conditions would indeed be far worse if these ideals had not initially been expressed, and if they were not yearly reaffirmed.
As you both suppose, enough constructive psychic energy is generated during the holiday season to recharge psychic batteries, so to speak, for quite some time. Were it not for this your whole race would be in much more serious a predicament.
One of the reasons, Joseph, for your own lack of festive spirit in the past has been the result of your realization that this gap between idealism and action is great. You could not therefore enter into what you felt to be hypocrisy of the season. All the more, since you have no particular conviction, anymore than Ruburt has, concerning the historic existence of a Christ.
To some extent, I have explored some of this, but it will do you well to join wholeheartedly into the very necessary spirit of the time, for it is constructive and most beneficial. And, in so doing, you help yourself and others.
(Early Sessions: Book 5, Session 213, December 01, 1965)
– Courtesy of Seth Network International –
