Introduction to The Wizards of Consciousness

What if consciousness is not a byproduct of matter, but the force behind and within matter, nature, events, and physically materialized life of every sort? What if creation is directed by the thoughts of consciousness?And what if we are consciousness?

Lynda Madden Dahl, author of Beyond the Winning Streak: Using Conscious Creation to Consistently Win at Life; and Ten Thousand Whispers: A Guide to Conscious Creation, takes us on an exploration of consciousness from the inside out. Using the Seth material as her basis, she explains the multidimensionality of consciousness, and how and why it creates physical reality. And, as usual in her writings, Dahl consistently brings us back to the practical aspects of creation, and what they mean to a fulfilling, abundant life. 

Full Introduction Chapter

Where your physical survival…once depended upon a narrowed focus while you learned physical manipulation, now the success of that manipulation necessitates a broadening of focus—a new awakening into the larger existence of the selfhood…
                —Seth, The "Unknown" Reality, Volume One, Session 686

  Oh, my gawd! I thought. Now you've done it. Let's see how you psychically wiggle out of this one. It had been two hours since I'd returned to my New York City hotel room after a leisurely breakfast, and I was headed out the door for my first appointment of the day. As I searched the desktop for my room key, it hit me—I'd left it in the outside lock when I'd entered the room after tea and a croissant that morning. I opened the door and studied the empty key slot, and knew I had choices to make.

In days of old, there would have been no option except to ask that I be moved to another room immediately. Now, things were different. Times had changed. I had changed. Now I knew one of my choices was to get on with my day, not worry about the missing key, and simply feel at home in a safe universe.

Oh, right. Midtown New York does have a slight reputation, remember? So you don't lock your home or car—the Northwest this isn't. Yeah, but I'm me. I don't change just because my location changes. I take my security with me, as long as I believe in it.

And therein lay my dilemma. Did I believe New York was as safe for me as Oregon? How had I felt the previous day on my cab ride in from La Guardia? What thoughts had registered that night when I had considered leaving the hotel at midnight for a stroll? How had I felt on previous trips into the city, about its people, its atmosphere, its attitude?

Somewhat uneasy, I uneasily admitted. Were my off-center feelings enough to set the stage for personal grief? I wondered. Or, if I used the magical approach to life, the approach I'm supposed to be learning, could I stay in my present room and walk away unscathed three days later when I departed for Washington, D.C.?

It only took seconds to collect my thoughts and sense of personal safety around me like a familiar cloak. As soon as I made the decision to continue my stay in the room and simply request a replacement key from the front desk, I felt solid again. Only once or twice during the remainder of my time in New York did I fleetingly wonder what had happened to the key. But never again did I feel a sense of unease.

Until I got to D.C., that is, and promptly lost my American Express card, followed the next day by my Visa. What the heck's going on! I asked my inner self. "Well," it replied in all its wisdom, "you're experimenting with creation, so experiment away. Only tuck a quarter into your shoe in case you choose to lose your purse and have to make a phonecall."

Very funny, oh great spirit guide. Very funny, unless you're on the receiving end of such events, then they become Learning Experiences. That's capital L, capital E: those events most people would rather do without. But life is a Learning Experience and there's no way around it, so I decided I'd better make the best of two more uneasy situations. I pulled my fraying security cloak about me, and decided I'd not consider the whereabouts of either card with trepidation. I'd use the magical approach to life, the approach I'm supposed to be learning, and assume nothing of ill import would come of the loss of either card. And it didn't.

Good-Bye Mainstream

Metaphysics has changed my life. While my anecdotal slant on the lost objects mentioned above has been brushed lightly with humor, the impact of what occurred is anything but light. Many facets of metaphysics come into play when any event is experienced, and a structure that supports the creation of an event becomes obvious after studying metaphysics for awhile. At least the brand of metaphysics explained by Jane Roberts and Seth.

If you have never heard of Jane and Seth, you were probably flowing with mainstream America during the 1970s and early 1980s during their tremendous popularity. Although "New Age" seems old hat nowadays, the term wasn't even coined when Seth made his appearance in this reality in the early 1960s. In fact, it's been suggested that the combined writings of Jane Roberts and Seth launched that era of broader thought that moved so many out of the conventional flow and into new understandings quite at odds with most of the world's accepted beliefs.

In 1963 Jane, a young woman and respected author, decided to write a book on extrasensory perception. As part of her research into the subject, she and her husband Robert F. Butts borrowed a Ouija board from a friend to get a feel for the mystical lay of the land. As their fingers touched the plastic pointer, it slowly moved toward letter after letter of the alphabet printed on the board's surface. After several sessions the pointer picked up speed and started quickly moving between the letters. The letters formed words and words sentences, and sentences formed a conversation with an entity who called himself Seth, an "energy personality essence."

Within ten or so sessions on the Ouija board, Jane had the urge to speak for Seth. Eventually she dropped enough of her concerns and inhibitions to let Seth use her voice and persona to communicate his words around the world. While Jane's psyche moved out of the way, many times leaving her without a clue as to what was said during the time Seth was talking through her, Rob took hand-written notes. Jane logged over 4,000 hours in trance, resulting in over 1,800 transcribed sessions over twenty-plus years.

Seth dictated verbatim ten books during that time, and Jane wrote another 15 of her own concurrently with Seth's works-in-progress.¹ An almost equal body of work still awaits publication: sessions originally deleted from book material for various reasons (including personal information given Rob and Jane), and transcriptions of ESP class sessions Jane held for many years. An estimated seven to ten million people have read—and many of those constantly re-read—the combined works of these two incredibly brilliant thinkers, work that is now archived at Yale University, the only metaphysical material accepted by Yale to date.

Statistics, however, only tell a small part of the Seth/Jane Roberts phenomenon. Most important, lives have been forever changed because of the impact of the material on people's thinking. Certainly mine was. I read my first Seth book in 1984, and after a period of hesitation about jumping from the comforting banks of mainstream into the foo-foo waters of metaphysics, I never looked back. Thank goodness.

The Secret Life of Thought

The message that weaves so eloquently through the Seth material is that each of us is consciousness which chose to be born into physical reality for our own reasons. Our lives have great meaning and purpose because we planned to come here to experience the translation of our thoughts, feelings and beliefs into events. The now common Seth quote, "You create your own reality," turns the world's ideas upside down and inside out because it suggests that the cause of events is within each of us, not generated by outside forces such as randomness, luck, fate, other people or circumstances beyond our control.

Seth says thoughts take on a life of their own after they're created. They join with others of like nature and eventually, if enough thoughts and feelings are generated along the same lines, they form an event that dutifully enters our existence as a life experience. That experience may be an interaction with other people, a material object we wish to own or see, an emotion we want to feel, or any other kind of happening. In fact, any event we experience, from the walk down the driveway to secure our morning newspaper, to the walk down the aisle to join our beloved in matrimony, had to be thought or felt into existence, or we simply would not have experienced it. There is no moment of the day that is excluded from this statement, no event that falls outside its parameters. If we experienced it, we created it. End of story.

Well, not quite. For most readers of the Seth material, that statement signals the beginning of their search for understanding. The ones who hold no curiosity about the metaphysics behind creation usually set the books aside and move on to other topics that catch their attention. The ones who stay with Seth long enough to start the questions flowing seldom leave for other, less complicated ground, because other ground doesn't seem to grow answers to seeded questions with the depth that Seth readers come to expect.

And the questions seldom stop. If we create each experience, how do we do it? Why do we do it? What makes it possible? How do we change what we don't like about our lives? How do we enhance what we do enjoy in our lives? What gives simple, everyday thought the power to create events? What assistance, if any, do we receive from sources outside our known time and space? And what does any of this have to do with consciousness?

Seth answers these questions and hundreds of others, including ones we hadn't previously thought to ask, and he answers them without the trappings of dogma or the distortions created by stuffing new concepts into very, very old thought boxes. Expect fresh, intelligent, clear ideas when you pick up any of Jane Roberts's books. You won't be disappointed or disillusioned, and you just may find information that strikes enough of a chord with you that you set about consciously changing your life based on newly redefined personal desires, intents and purposes.

Choices Unparalleled

It's called conscious creation, and it's all about how we can indeed use our inherent abilities as consciousness in physical form to decide what we want to experience, and then make it happen through focused intent. I've done it, as I told my readers in the two books I've written on the subject, and I know many others who have, also. We've stopped illnesses, made money, changed weather patterns, brought love into our lives, found fulfillment however we chose to define it. Because we're pioneers and not experts, we hit our private walls at times, but at least we're trying. We're breaking ground, connecting dots of understanding for others. We see the big picture, thanks to Seth, Jane and Rob, but we're not always adept at maneuvering within it. But give us an A for effort.

Part of our problem is that we're dealing with concepts that are completely foreign to most people and heresy to others, and it's tough to keep the faith at times in light of more standard world thinking. One of Seth's main ideas is that consciousness gives birth to everything; that is, consciousness is always in place first, followed by what it creates: matter, events, nature, creatures, universes—like we said, everything. If conscious creation is viable, consciousness must be in place first—and we must be consciousness. Seth says that we are literal extensions of the consciousness of All That Is, and as such are imbued with the same characteristics as All That Is, including the ability to create with our thoughts. He says we have been given the greatest gift of all…the gift of the gods…the gift of creativity.

Yet the ability to consciously create events and material objects is believed impossible within the theories of classical science, most theologies and most branches of psychology. Conscious creation seems impossible within these thought systems because none of them recognize the role consciousness plays in creating and sustaining physical reality. And yet many of us have purposely, consciously used our thoughts to bring about desires of choice.

Rethinking the Scheme of Things

Personally, I'm weary of being told by the prevalent world thought systems that I'm powerless. They say it in nice ways, but the message is clear—and constant. Well, what if they're wrong? What if they have the whole picture turned inside out and misunderstand the message because they are viewing it from the back of the canvas? What if their theories and postulations are based on incorrect readings of physical reality because they're missing the point that brings everything into clear focus? Indeed, what would happen to their theories if they believed that consciousness is all there is and from it, via thought, springs everything else? What would happen? The world would change.

We would, individually and as a whole, start to understand the genesis of events, and we would learn to create experiences worthy of our godly status. We'd stop unwittingly using our power of thought to cause personal and global disasters, and get on with creating lives of worthiness filled with value. Gee whiz, we might even figure out the real purpose of physical reality and what we're supposed to learn about the power of consciousness.

In Ten Thousand Whispers: A Guide to Conscious Creation and Beyond the Winning Streak: Using Conscious Creation to Consistently Win at Life, I looked at the subject of consciousness from a practical point of view. I laid the groundwork for why conscious creation is possible, and then focused on techniques and suggestions that might help readers create what they wish, and stories that told how others had done it. I call those books my personal chapters one and two of consciousness, or consciousness learning to understand itself.

As my comprehension grows I realize there is more to know, more to decipher, more to explore. This book, then, becomes my own personal chapter three, the chapter in which, by writing about it, I seek to understand more about consciousness, its purpose, its structure, its scope, and its integration into our physical reality. In the back of my mind the idea continually flashes that if we know enough about consciousness, we'll know how to lead fulfilling, satisfying, abundant, loving lives—consciously and consistently. And that, Alfie, is what it's all about.

This is not a book about conscious creation per se, or the how-tos of the subject. It's more a look at consciousness in general, and physically attuned consciousness in particular. Of course, any discussion of consciousness leads us to answers about how to use our creative powers to knowingly shape the individual moments of our lives into one heck of a whole, and hopefully this book is no exception. Through new understandings we will come to terms with who we are, where we're going, and how to get there with ease.

To study consciousness means we must look at it with clear eyes and unmuddied beliefs. And to do that necessitates a step outside the rigorous doctrines and dogmas of accepted world thought, since few if any such systems acknowledge the existence of consciousness. Unofficial, unsanctioned sources of information, then, are our textbooks for this step in our learning.

And, believe me, the information sources for this book's trek through consciousness are very unsanctioned. We're over the edge and knee-deep in unconventional thought here—thankfully. As I said in Ten Thousand Whispers, mainstream thinking hasn't exactly brought peace on earth and abundance for all, so maybe it's time to set aside, or at least question, the assumptions underlying conventional ideas. And the paradox is we can't question the conventional point of view from the conventional point of view.

Yeah, we're over the edge, and maybe, just maybe, we'll find enough answers and insights from the unsanctioned to eventually understand what a nice bunch of people like you and me are doing here in the first place.

What They're Saying about The Wizards of Consciousness:

"With her great vitality, Lynda Dahl helps many others to open up their own innate creative abilities. And from where she is now, I can hear my deceased wife exclaim: 'Terrific Lynda—go for it!' "
                —Robert Butts, husband of Jane Roberts, and Co-Creator of the Seth/Jane Roberts Books

"Consciousness is much more than mathematical formulas and quantum theories. Lynda Dahl captures the true nature of consciousness—a vital, alive, creative force—and through her writings we come to better understand the power within ourselves."
               —Norman Friedman, author of Bridging Science and Spirit and The Hidden Domain

"Lynda Dahl expands our world by showing us the creative power of consciousness…its nature, purpose, and integration into our physical reality. The Wizards of Consciousness is stimulating, unconventional, and filled with hope for the future."
               —Walter Eckhart, Ph.D., Professor, The Salk Institute