Seth Quotes Chapter 23
Your ideas of Atlantis are partially composed of future memories. They are psychic yearnings toward the ideal civilization--patterns within the psyche, even as each fetus has within it the picture of its own most ideal fulfillment toward which it grows.
Atlantis is a land that you want to inhabit, appearing in your literature, your dreams, and your fantasies, serving as an impetus for development. It is real and valid. In your terms it is not "yet' physical fact, but in some ways it is more real than any physical fact, for it is a psychic blueprint.
It carries also, however, the imprint of your fears, for the tales say that Atlantis was destroyed. You place it in your past while it exists in your future. Not the destruction alone, but the entire pattern seen through the framework of your beliefs. Beside this, however, many civilizations have come and gone in somewhat the same manner, and the "myth” [of Atlantis] is based somewhat then on physical fact in your terms.
The species then moves into its own new houses. Atlantis is the story of a future probability projected backward into an apparent past.
Your planet as you know it is a certain kind of focus point for consciousness. At your level you think it is divided into areas of land and water-continents and oceans, islands and peninsulas, cities and woods-because that is all you perceive. Your consciousness is tuned in to frequencies of perception that give you that impression. A cat's world, or an insect's or a plant's, are each far different, yet equally valid.
As simply as I can explain it, your planet is also "divided” into time and probability areas. Period. So many civilizations exist at once, then, and there are certain bleed-throughs. In your terms some civilizations are real and perceivable, and some are not.
"Atlantis. First of all, take it for granted--as you do--that your ideas about the age of the earth are erroneous. There were intelligent human beings far earlier than is supposed; and because you assume a one-line kind of progression from an apelike creature to man, you ignore any evidence that shows to the contrary. There were highly developed human beings with elaborate civilizations, existing simultaneously with what you might call animal kingdoms--that is, more or less organized primeval animal tribes, possessing their own kinds of ‘primitive' cultures.
"Those animal kingdoms, some of them, utilized tools. Their senses were extremely acute, and their ‘cultures' dealt with a kind of transmission of knowledge that made a highly complicated vocabulary unnecessary.
"Those species did not vie for domination of the earth, but simply shared the same general environment with the more sophisticated groupings beyond their own perimeters. There were many highly technical human cultures, but in your terms not on a global scale. The legend of Atlantis is actually based upon several such civilizations. No particular civilization is the basis, however. Apart from that, the legend as picked up, so to speak, by Plato was a precognition of the future probability, an image of an inner civilization of the mind actually projected outward into the future, where it would be used as a blueprint, dash-the lost grandeur, as, in other terms, Eden became the lost garden of paradise.
Ruburt has implied in [his novel] The Education of Oversoul Seven that some archaeological discoveries about the past are not discovered in your present because they do not exist yet. Now such concepts are difficult to explain in my kind of prose, and in your language. But in certain terms, the ruins of Atlantis have not been found because they have not been placed in your past yet, from the future.
"Now the future is probable. However, in your terms there are ruins of the civilizations that served as the ‘concrete' basis for the one Atlantean legend. Those civilizations were scattered. The so-called ruins would not be found in any one place as expected, therefore. There are some beneath the Aegean Sea, and some beneath an offshoot of the Atlantic, and some beneath the Arctic, for the world had a different shape.
"In far greater terms time is simultaneous, so those civilizations exist along with your own. Your methods of dating the age of the earth are very misleading.
"In your terms, from your present you ‘plant' images, tales, legends, ‘at any given time,' that seem to come from the past, but are actually like ghost images from the future, for you to follow or disregard as you choose.
"Atlantis and the Garden of Eden are the same in that regard.
"When you think that perhaps your species came from another planetary system, in time terms, then of course you are still dealing with old concepts. In your usual terms of thinking, the earth does not exist at all--not if you are considering it as a chunk of matter occupying a certain position in a physical cosmos. It is really futile to question whether the universe came from a big boom or is constantly expanding (though in those terms I have said it continually expands, as an idea or a dream does). I am not saying the universe does not exist--only that it does not exist in the way that it seems to you.
"By itself (with a smile, almost an outright laugh): The truth of the matter is far more spectacular.
"All That Is creates its reality as it goes along. Each world has its own impetus, yet all are ultimately connected. The true dimensions of a divine creativity would be unendurable for any one consciousness of whatever import, and so that splendor is infinitely dimensionalized (most intensely throughout), worlds spiraling outward with each ‘moment' of a cosmic breath; with the separation of worlds a necessity; and with individual and mass comprehension always growing at such a rate that All That Is multiplies itself at microseconds, building both pasts and futures and other time scales you do not recognize. Each is a reality in itself, with its own potentials, and with no individual consciousness, however minute, ever lost.
"In that kind of framework, how can I explain an Atlantis? It exists both in your past and future, a probable world that some of you will choose from a model placed in the past of your future--partially based upon fact, in your terms, but with its greatest validity lying in its possibilities.”
--Seth