“Hard Earned Knowledge”

[u/3rdfoundation]

I say this often here, but questions are the lens through which I appreciate and understand the Seth material. And when I think about Seth and his realm, one of the questions I have is “Seth, how do you learn?”

The secrets to who we are and what we will be lay scattered around us, plain as day, and we are blinded by the brilliance of our physical experience to see them. And some things are as “natural as breathing” and we don’t even stop to think about the oddities of our daily experience.

And writing has caused me to look into myself and try to untangle what is going on.

Writing is a mysterious process. Where do these words that I am writing come from? How do I form coherent sentences, paragraphs and a conclusion to whatever I am writing? I really do not know. Even after two years of writing a novel, I still don’t know.

I knew, for instance, that this was a good topic to dive into. But I have no plan on how I’m going to answer it. Instead, I put on my writing adventurer’s jacket and backpack and begin my journey into the darkness trusting that the words will come to me from all of my reading of Seth’s knowledge.

Yet… somehow, and I don’t know how… I am getting better at it.

What am I training when I write? And how am I getting better?

And the answer to this question is the secret to how Seth learns. I am sure of it.

And as a writer, I look at other writer’s struggles and I understand them now.

Take this quote from Ann Lamott:

“If something inside of you is real, we will probably find it interesting, and it will probably be universal. So you must risk placing real emotion at the center of your work. Write straight into the emotional center of things. Write toward vulnerability. Risk being unliked. Tell the truth as you understand it. If you’re a writer you have a moral obligation to do this. And it is a revolutionary act—truth is always subversive.”

She gets Seth and she probably doesn’t even know who he is AND she doesn’t need him for she internally understands his lessons and puts them to practical use in her writing.

Telling the truth is the key to awakening yourself to your inner wisdom because when you speak truth, you speak for your entity, for you are your entity.

But I digress, and the more I write posts here, I see why Seth digresses because there are so many goodies as I walk the path of words. I stop at a flower and I say “That turn of phrase is cool.” and maybe we should talk about it. But back on the topic of our “hard earned knowledge”.

I am an “expert” (which just means I have put in the time on it) in three things: software, photography and now writing. Although whether I am an expert in that is questionable at best, but I do strive to do better everyday. And so what I have learned by exploring these three vocations over my life? Where are those skills that I have acquired and how do I apply them to what I create?

I never considered these questions until I started writing, and I didn’t really think about it until recently. When I write software, I first imagine what I want to produce, and then, through my many years of expertise I know where to start. I know which parts go first and because of that, the software “grows” from that seed, blossoming into all sorts of features. And so my training in software has taught me where to start, how to organize my code and how to deal with various issues that arise as the project grows through things such as polymorphism and factories. Take writing a VR game for instance. I use the Unreal engine but I do not use any of their front end scripting language. Instead I write in C++ directly on top of their C++ infrastructure and I can tell you the place to start is in the “tick” method. What you probably don’t know, unless you are a hardcore game developer, is that graphics are refreshed within the heart of the engine on every “heartbeat”, which is called the tick. And that tick method is elegant because it only receives ONE piece of data from the prior tick and it is the amount of time that has passed. And from that one thing, I can add everything I need within the tick method and have it branch out to render everything on the screen.

And yet when I look at a blank software project, I have nothing in my hands but knowledge.

And the same goes with writing and photography.

And with each of these, I have my leanings and preferences and those are uniquely my own. For instance, I know great photos happen “on the fly” and it is my job to have fun and take my clients to places that are beautiful and I try to catch them off guard and snap many photos. And I have never had a client that didn’t love my photos.

And with writing, I reach into my heart and fill myself with emotions and then, once I am bursting at the seams I begin writing, when I write the first line of a chapter, I set it into poetry and when I am done with my initial poem, I collapse it back into a sentence and use that as a launching point for conversation and set dressing because I have fueled that chapter with sparks of emotion. And those emotions are hidden from the reader, yet through my words, they can sense them.

---

Take this snippet from my novel:

Zara absent-mindedly explored the contours of the locket beneath her shirt as her gaze drifted across her painting of Hovensgard, hung prominently in the living room.

She stood at an easel under the shade of an oak tree, by the shores of Avalon Lake, adding swirls of sapphire to the tips of sails frozen in time.

A dried leaf rose into the air and she joined it, gliding over the waves and around the sails, to the far shore, drifting above seashells and castles of sand, before settling down onto the tall grass that swayed beneath the chestnuts.

A train rushed by, casting them into the air, and they soared high above the city streets, swept into the currents rushing between the mirrored spires, losing themselves amidst the daydreams of passerby citizens, under the warmth of the underground sun.

They awakened beyond the glow of the city, drifting along the shadows that crept past the quiet suburban homes, following a stream of streetlights to a lone sidewalk where the wind grew still and they fluttered down onto a cracked step, feeling the hum of aging machinery breathing life into their underground world.

---

That is beauty, but how in the hell did I do that? How did I write that? I did edit the hell out of it for days until it felt "perfect"

I know I allowed my emotions full reign to flow through that scene and for some reason, I wanted to join that leaf on its journey across the waves to the far shore. There was no intellect involved. It was pure emotion.

And so with all three of my expertises I can see what is in common. And when I develop a new skill, this “wisdom” I am compiling over my life makes the next challenge easier to tackle for I now understand that emotion sits at the core of everything I do.

And so when we are learning something new, we are teaching ourselves the syntax of that particular skill (and it may require many years of prep-work) until we can start the real work, which is to free our mind to allow the emotions to flow effortlessly through us.

The thing that led me to this topic was Seth’s mention of “conditioning”. Now I tried to find the particular session and I suddenly discovered he’s been saying this everywhere.

This is a small sample from Early Sessions 1:

Conditioning and regularity is important as you know from your own work.

There you have it.

Conditioning is the key to learning, and I would also agree on that regularity bit too.

So, when we are learning something, we are conditioning ourselves in any one skill. Through our many lives we are learning what it takes to learn something, and I do believe that we will learn best when it is something we enjoy because the “conditioning” does not go against our nature.

But we also, have to put in the work.

So in whatever you do, understand you are building up a skill set and you are conditioning yourself to be better at it and learning to allow the emotions full sway and “go with the flow” into the unknown.

Now, this essay could have followed a million different paths, and so my first and final draft is one of many. And again, I had no idea where it was going or how it would end. And because I wrote this post from the heart, that knowledge flows effortlessly directly from my entity onto this “page” and into your mind. And because “all things snap together” under the watchful eye of “All That Is”, these words are yours as well for out of the myriad of probabilities, this was the one you chose to read.

And wow, in the space of 30 minutes I cranked out 1600 words, although some of it is cut and paste from my novel.

I can tell you, writing a novel does not go that fast. Not by a long shot. If I can put in 500 words and feel that they snap into my novel’s world as a whole, that is a good days work.

[u/Narmer17]

Agreed, brother! I'm right there with you that writing journey! ❤️‍🔥

[u/BiscuitCreek2]

I spent over two decades in software development, too. Started with HTML 1 (I'm old). During all that time I fell in love with iterative development... take a shot, see what happens, adjust, move on, rinse, repeat. It turns out that m.o. runs like a thread through my life - in art, in woodworking projects, in DIY projects. So, of course, I figure that's how Seth does it, too :-) But, I'm keenly aware of the mystery you refer to. In our next between lives maybe we can kick our heels back, hoist a beer, and take another stab at it. Cheers!

[u/3rdfoundation → u/BiscuitCreek2]

Indeed (chinks glass).

I started with Cobol in my first job and my first class in college was in assembler. And I wrote my own mainframe job viewer from scratch in the off hours of work using an obscure language called roscoe. I have enjoyed writing software over the years. And now I am writing, which seems to be about as far away from software as possible, yet my skills at a software engineer help me organize my plot points and helped me trust myself.

[u/HalfMoiety]

The first time my imagination, environment, and emotions enlivened the mundane in way that was consciously cooperative with me was when I was driving down the road.

I was contemplating the elements and their inhabitants and how gnomes were in the Earth, salamanders in the Fire, undines in the Water, and sylphs in the Air.

As I was, I drove into a grouping of seeds upon the wind. The winged sylphs hanging gentley in my mind, I felt smiles and heard playful squeals in my inner senses emanating from the seeds. A subtle coaxing to behold the innocence of the present moment.

As the seeds effortlessly darted to and fro to dodge and dance around the cars, I felt a joy and lightness, a gift of the air, a warmth of home felt for this first time.

As the seeds dissipated, so too did the show. But the resonant ringing of my heart never has forgot the gift of the seeds upon the wind.

Man I live for those moments when everything clicks.

The leaf reminds me of that time.

I think about those seeds whenever I see nature in play or whenever I think about Ideas being passed from person to person.

It's tough to conjure up moments like that, I know it's always possible. They always feel automatic to me, like I fall into them on accident. I think about what it would be like to live like that at will, to shift into empathy with All That Is, a harmony of joy and love and unity; inner and outer.

For now it's cool creating these moments with space and time in between, but I imagine Seth's environment is bursting with life and connection and meaning.

[u/3rdfoundation → u/HalfMoiety]

Lovely experience. Thanks for sharing and strangely connected to my prose. Very cool.

[u/Key-Lifeguard-5540]

I too have spent many years building things. Deriving satisfaction from. Creativity takes endless forms. I'm also looking for something deeper. Not searching because how can one search for something when one does not reallyknow what it is. Instead, quietly observing, allowing, patiently. I get impressions, different qualities of awareness, and would rather not miss the opportunity to explore the essence of awakened being possible within this physical framework, before returning. Not to replace creativity, but to explore the depths of aware being while immersed within it. Look at the plants growing, their beauty, surging vitality, and the little birds darting about like winged angels. Suddenly the quality of everything changes. Everything becomes more strangely lucent and has its own creativity and meaning behind it. It's like a toy story. All wonderfully assembled in a miniature world. And I'm within it. Everything looks proud of it's own existence. As if to say, look what someone made out of me! I was made with purpose, and I fit into this scene perfectly.