Travelers who choose to take the exit marked "Conscious Reality Creation" often find themselves wandering unfamiliar back roads. It's a territory of lush landscapes, poignant vistas, and charming waysides. It can also include unmarked forks in the road, deserts, and potholes. With the delicious wisdom of hindsight, it amuses me to reminisce and to enjoy this magical journey.

When I first read Seth Speaks in the spring of 1980 I thought I was reading it for the purposes of gathering information. I hoped I was rescuing a friend from the clutches of a "Sethian" cult. So, I hardly noticed when the vehicle of my own life made a veering turn out of my customary, well-marked, fast lane and took a flying dive onto those same back roads. A chapter later, still intent on my original purpose, I'd just taken my first unintended fork in the road—though it would be a long time before I remembered it.

It may be possible to relegate Jane Roberts's work to gathering dust on a bookshelf. Not every traveler finds the back roads appealing. Sooner or later, however, the committed traveler confronts a decision: How do we pragmatically apply the map of what we are reading to the process of exploring the territory? Some, as I did, may find themselves using methods more conducive to high-speed, destination-driven travel.

The signpost said, "Rote Seth." Looked like a good road to me. I sailed right through every Jane Roberts book I could lay my hands on. It wasn't long before I was getting pretty good at this stuff. I knew EE units, CUs, CPs, ATI, aspects, counterparts, and reincarnational selves. I was going to pass the test with flying colors. I drove by every wayside marked "practice element" or "exercise"...who needed to stop for those? Then one day this fork of the road came to an abrupt end, right at the B. Dalton's bookstore.

"What do you mean Dreams, Evolution and Value Fulfillment isn't in print yet?"

What to do now? I could get back on the freeway. Or....I turned around and drove straight back to the first wayside I came to.

"It will do you no good if you are simply intellectually aware of what I say, but practically ignorant. Period. Therefore the exercises will be important because they will offer you evidence of your own greater perceptive abilities" (The Nature of the Psyche, Session 764).

For the next year, I kept a copy of one of Seth's exercises on my refrigerator door. I changed these exercises once a month and allowed their presence to be a daily reminder to do that exercise. Finding my way onto the "Applied Seth" fork turned out to be as easy as making the choice to do it.

There are some twists and turns along the Applied Seth fork of the road. Places where reasoning circles back on itself. Places where what appears to be may not be so. Places where we get lost in the morass of mind seeking to determine the how. Forgetting that the process is often its own best teacher.

Turn One is a tightly reasoned circle. We each create our own reality. We can create whatever we want in this life. Therefore we can create others to be the way we want them to be. Each person has many probable versions. We can, therefore, draw to us the probable version we want. If we change the thoughts we have about that person we get them the way we want them, right? This kind of thinking provides an incentive to examine closely what we think and to uncover our beliefs. But can we truly make another be the way we want him or her to be?

"People with like ideas reinforce each other's beliefs. You may meet with some misunderstanding when you suddenly decide to change your reality by changing your beliefs....There may be those who need the old framework and someone, if not you, to play the role you played before. Those people will either drop out of your experience or you must drop them from yours" (The Nature of Personal Reality, Session 622).

Action is an essential part of the application. Circumstances are altered by changing beliefs. But it is also necessary to act out those new beliefs. We shape the inner world through our thoughts. We follow the inner into the outer through our choice to act.

Turn Two I have dubbed the Pollyanna Turn. It goes like this: If we create the experiences in our world, we ought to love them. We ought to accept them as they are. Or, at the very least, learn to love them.

We can get lost in these ideas. Reality begins to create us. The power of action inherent in choice is lost. We ignore one of the finest tools at our disposal for forming the world the way we want it to be. That tool is the word "No."

"Now. Affirmation means saying 'yes' to yourself and to the life you lead, and to accepting your own unique personhood. That affirmation means that you declare your individuality. Affirmation means that you embrace the life that is yours and flows through you. Your affirmation of yourself is one of your greatest strengths. You can at times quite properly deny certain portions of experience, while still confirming your own vitality. You do not have to say 'yes' to people, issues, or events with which you are deeply disturbed. Affirmation does not mean a bland wishywashy acceptance of anything that comes your way, regardless of your feelings about it" (The Nature of Personal Reality, Session 672).

My friend has a marvelous computer in his car. Plug into it "where you are" and "where you want to be." Viola! The fastest, most expedient route is planned for you. It spits out information in milliseconds. We know how much gas to plan for. We know where to stop to buy it. We know where to spend the night.

On the back roads such a computer can get us lost. We begin to imagine that programmed somewhere are all the "proper" beliefs to hold. When experience reflects events we do not want, we hustle to uncover beliefs. We lose sight of the scenery. We ignore the pleasures of the wind in our hair and the smell of fresh mown hay. The experience slips from our grasp and is lost behind the focus of getting it "right." We miss the point.

The point is that we are here to experience. No right or wrong. No good or bad. No evil. We are here to watch our beliefs—regardless of what they are—spin out into reality. It can be fun to wait a while before changing a belief that no longer serves. To wait allows us to observe its effect in our lives. It lets us see the beauty of this creative process and to place ourselves fully in the present moment.

You are the only one who constructs your reality. You are the only one who can judge what works or does not work for you. To know this for myself has freed me to, as they say, "wake up and smell the roses." It took me a while to get there, but I am sure glad that I did. It led me to the belief that:

I honor myself with the right to do what I want. I honor you by defending your right to do what you want.

Or, another way to put that is: I can only judge for myself what works for me; only you can judge for yourself what works for you.

Some poignant vistas

Seth devotes two whole volumes and lots of space in other works to the "unknown" reality. In the early days, I was focused on traveling the road and forgot to stop to see this view. Linear thinking dominates our Western world. What we cannot see, smell, hear, taste, feel, or measure seems amorphous, unreal. The limitations of life perceived this way offer a safety net. With it comes assurance that we know what we are about.

We have a travel partner—a hitchhiker in the form of the self that does not focus solely on the manifest. Sometimes this hitchhiker sneaks through my back door and sharply steers a new direction for my life. I discovered the vistas of the unknown reality in this way. Back in the days when I still thought changing beliefs was hard, I was working on creating a belief in my own worthiness. To do this, I modified a Seth quote into an affirmation: "I am a worthy human being, unlimited by nature, born into flesh to materialize as best I can the great joy and spontaneity that is my nature."

Suddenly I was becoming more and more curious about all those other unlimited dimensions of existence. The world can be linear and goal-oriented but it can also be expansive and associative. To explore the world in this fashion augments the experience of life. Experience tumbles into symbolic realms and those symbols tumble back out again into new form. Achievement integrates with process. Living, no matter how we do it, breathes air into the balloon of life. The more air breathed into the balloon, the more there is to know of oneself, and the act of knowing repeats the cycle. We get more curious.

And curiosity evolves as a tool for conscious creation. It is one thing to think, "I want a million dollars." It is quite another to think, "Who would I be if I had a million dollars?" The act of finding out frees one from worrying about how to get there. The moment we can think it, we are in the act of creating it.

I'd been driving the back roads for a long time before I realized that the lumps, bumps, boulders, and potholes were my creation, too. Not that challenges are not part of the joy of experience, but when they dominate experience, it's time to take a second look. I looked. The looking took me all the way back to the beginning of this trip. There, I found the fork I missed. You guessed it. I had forgotten to choose the fun.

Does it matter which route any of us takes along this journey? Does it matter if we stop to see specific vistas? No, it does not. The journey offers opportunities for us to explore and to learn. There is never a moment when we cannot change the fork we are on. With the wisdom of hindsight I still would not change the way I came. What I would do, were I to do it again, is be gentler, kinder and more loving with myself.

As I contemplate the road ahead, I find myself in awe of the exquisite creation that is this earth experience: the beauty of what we have given ourselves with bodies that can taste, smell, feel, hear, see, have sex. With minds, hearts, psyches, and the slow drag of time on our creative process. It is an extraordinary opportunity. We will never ever again experience this lifetime, in this body, with this particular orientation in consciousness. I am glad that I have chosen not just to travel. . . but to live here.

About the author: Linnaea Roberge is a self-described explorer of consciousness who is currently working on two books: one is a channeled work and the other a work of fiction. Linnaea resides in Oakland, California. She is a single mother of four grown children and has one grandchild.