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Why I am a Sethian

A bit about who I am and the influences of the Seth Material on my life

By Jonathan Caflisch

In the early seventies, I found myself in a place of feeling at a loss in my life, confused, depressed and searching everywhere from self-help books, psychiatrists to religion for an answer to my dilemma.

Through coincidence, if there is such a thing, I found myself reading Seth Speaks by Jane Roberts. This book and the many Seth books that followed, helped me to develop a philosophy and a way of viewing myself in the world that has lead me to a place of personal responsibility and contentment in my life. How and why it all came to be of course could be a long story, but it started early in my childhood.

I was born in 1938 in Zurich. These were tumultuous times and my childhood was very rough by today's standards. I experienced abuse, including being sought out by pedophiles and emotional and physical at the hand of my father. I experienced failure in school and was what we analyze now as an attention deficit hyper activity disorder.

I remember that sometimes I could barely live in my skin and had to run so I did not feel. Today I say that I did not allow myself to feel myself. But I did have a balance; sometimes I did experience very quiet moments.

I was raised as a Protestant, but my mother had been raised Catholic and I was very attracted to the Catholic Church. I loved the mysticism expressed in Catholicism. But there, I was betrayed by a priest under the name of god, this memory was buried deep.

On the positive side of my childhood I had some very pleasant altered states of consciousness. My memories of being in the Swiss Alps are outstanding. The bus lines there were run by the post, the Post-Auto, and were painted in a beautiful yellow color with a double red stripe. I loved those buses. I was fascinated sitting in them going through tight turns in the mountain passes and of course the sounding of the melodic horn. The roads were so tight that my grandfather's house had deep grooves worn into the plaster stucco walls from trucks and buses rubbing into the walls as they passed by.

I loved the mountain village of my Grandfather. The sounds and the smells are now aromatherapy to me. I grew up in Zurich, but spent my holidays in Trin, a mountain village with all the bells and whistles of a storybook. Even though their lives were hard, the village people were very connected to a feeling mostly lost today, an inner state of grace carried within an ancient language, called romantsch.

I remember that one day my father, my Grandfather and Aunt Magi took me walking in the Alps. We walked up to a meadow just at the tree line to stock up the old barn with hay. That evening after a very rewarding hard working day, there were no machines, but quiet sounds and smells of hay and mountain herbs. I was bedded down up in the hay barn.

The adults spent the evening in the cabin and talking about old times. They had all been born on a farm in Missouri and when my grandmother passed away they immigrated back to Switzerland.

The night sky slowly took over the day, shadows first on the far mountainside. I sat on the ledge above the cow stalls, my feet dangling, the old wooden loading doors open. I sat there lost in the beauty, but I now know that what really happened was that I became totally present. The stars were brilliant, almost lucid.

Then I heard the echo from the Post Auto's horns. It echoed through all the mountains. This echo took part of my consciousness and I traveled with it and an expansion occurred and I felt everywhere at once. The stars were big and super dimensional. I felt complete and eternal and one with it all.

As a small boy I just took this experience for granted and had no context then to understand it but it became a pivotal moment in my life. This was the feeling that I would spend much of my life trying to recreate for myself and eventually find answers in the Seth Material.

I married and left Switzerland in the early 60's for Canada. It was the beginning of an era of change. I still functioned somewhat as that hyperactive child I had been although I had become a husband to Rosemarie and the father of three boys. My life was spent between working--I had my own mechanical business--and building racecars, Volkswagen based open wheelers. The years went by fast on the fast lane.

It was the 1970's and the aura of a new age was strong. My attraction and curiosity about the possibility of exploring consciousness with drugs grew stronger every day. I had already converted an old psychedelic school bus into a camper and I loaded up my wife and kids and headed off to the Mission Fair outside of Vancouver.

I still felt like an outsider, but I was attracted to the things and feelings the so-called hippies were doing. I did try some pot but it just left me feeling dumb or drugged.

I strolled through the fair grounds, my kids in tow, and came to a Tee Pee. I went inside, and the smoke was heavy. People were sitting around a very distinctive native man in the middle. He looked at me and said, "Here, its time." He handed me blob of paper and said, "don't worry it is Sandoz, the best." So began my first drug experience.

A large group of people was camped beside our bus. One member of this group, a young man, spirited and gentle, took me by the arm. "Take your shoes off," he said, "we are going for a walk." My friend talked about spiritual things and experiences and my feet hurt but he said simply, feel it. I did and found myself in my body feeling myself and I could not figure out why this felt so familiar.

When I arrived back at the bus, I sat watching my youngest son, Tom who was 1½, playing with the spring-loaded oven door. I would have never allowed this, but I got lost in my observations. Of course, the door is snapping closed and but I have slowed down enough to now experience part of Tom's experience. I observe that he is much more conscious and alert than I ever expected a child to be. It seemed like a time warp, Tom watched the door coming up and he pulled his hand casually out of the path of the door. He laughed and took glory in his accomplishment.

Right there I learned something I never forgot. What I learned there about projection of fear or confidence made it possible for my future family 20 years later, to hike the West Coast trail and celebrate my daughter's fifth birthday on the trail.

Rose came back and took Tom for a stroll. I sat there, feeling the gentle, but hot sun on my skin; I was wearing just shorts. The bells began ringing from the mission and the echo took my consciousness into a 360 degree perception. My perception was of such intense beauty that I believed I was hallucinating. Maybe, but the next day everything I had seen so intensely still looked the same, it was still there and it puzzled me for a long time.

I do not advocate the use of drugs, far from it. I know now, that those states are latent in our psyche and can be experienced without drugs in a natural integrative way, the same way that they had been for me as a child in the mountains.

The following fall we traveled south. I sold everything which did not fit in to the bus, except my Dune buggy and TV. Yes, new house and furniture sold and gone. It was an incredible leap of faith on Rosemarie's part. We went to Mexico with 1200 dollars cash, a little shorter on cash than we intended but by then I had an incredible faith.

In search of knowledge, we traveled to the land of sun. Armed with the teaching of Don Juan, I was looking for a teacher.

Strange circumstances lead me to encounter Walter, a very dark tall muscular Afro-American numerous times. Each time he needed my help. He had just left the Black Panther organization and there was no room for a white man in his life. In Mazatlan we met for the third time. I pulled his '52 Chevy camper out of the deep sand. He said, "Jonathan I have been trying to avoid you, but this is getting too symbolic and I cannot deny it any more. I will pay attention to coincidence from now on."

We traveled for the next five months together. We meditated and studied together. I learned to get in touch with my black part and he learned to get in touch with his white part that he had been fighting for so long.

Walter was well acquainted with Voodoo, as the ancient healing art, and was in touch with mental powers, which were challenging for me to learn. High in the mountains of Guanajuato, we were walking miles away from anywhere. Walter in front, his German shepherd behind him, then me with my kids in tow.

On a small narrow path that wound through bushy grass we encounter the most vicious hungry pack of dogs I have ever seen. With foaming mouths and barking that pack was aiming at Walter's shepherd, it seemed. Walter was walking tall, he did not sway or pay any attention, and there was no sign that he even noticed. I knew were he was in his mind and I went to the same place within myself. I believe my sons John, Rick, and Tom--still a toddler--must have done the same by modeling from Walter.

The attacking pack of dogs stopped dead within six feet on either side of the path. With only subdued growls they let us walk by.

Month after month went by and each one of them it seemed was a year. We were out of mechanical time and we experienced psychological time, the eternity was contained within living in the spacious present. I learned about love and crying with all my heart. I connected with my family in a way I had never known existed although somewhere deep inside of me they felt familiar and nostalgic.

All my children are grown up now, but I still feel that bond and so do they. It was time to head back to Canada. In Santa Barbara I felt my first crash and my days of enlightenment were over. My stomach went into a tight knot. Bad vibes, I thought.

Our plan was to head to Alaska but on the way, we went to Vancouver Island to make quick money. An old friend from Switzerland owned a Volkswagen dealership in Campbell River. He offered me a job, but me, the old hippie, I had to prove that I can still do it--the mechanics there would not settle for any less--so I rebuilt a Volkswagen engine in one day.

I was in again and have stayed on the island since. While I enjoyed a good discipline and could block out everything that was going on inside me and go to work to support my family, underneath I had problems.

I started to have serious depression and reality problems. Something was not right, I had love but longed for it like never before. I went from highs to low, from Christian to Buddhism, from Cold Mountain encounter groups to changing my profession several times. I went to professional help to find out it was just an other dead end.

But I am a questioner and a survivor. One day in 1974, my friends and I were building a house on Savary Island. My friend Jerry gave me a book he said my wife had just read. It was intriguing but not my cup of tea.

So, on this cool evening in front of the fireplace we had just built I opened the book called Seth Speaks. I browsed through it and in my arrogance, offended myself with what the book said and I threw the book into the fire. I blew out all the candles and went to bed.

I woke up early in the morning. I felt panic. I had been dreaming I don't remember what and then realized it was about the book.

I rushed naked to the fireplace, avoiding the nails sticking out of two by fours left laying around from the day before and behold, the book was lying in the fireplace, Seth Speaks in bright letters, unharmed.

Without knowing it I became a sethian that day. And from then on it became a long journey to where I am now. Concepts which took me years to comprehend, beliefs that I could not accept, such as you create your own reality and other thought provoking concepts, today I counsel and teach and people understand far more easily than I did in the beginning.

The world has changed and there is a wonderful new age emerging, a crack in the wall. It is the underside of the manure of politics and wars and we will learn from it and grow flowers.

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