The Magical Approach: Seth Speaks About the Art of Creative Living
About This Book
The Magical Approach: Seth Speaks about the Art of Creative Living is among the most practical and immediately applicable of all the Seth books — focusing on a specific quality of mind and orientation to life that Seth calls the 'magical approach,' which he contrasts with the 'common sense approach' that is the dominant cognitive style of Western rationalist culture. The magical approach is not irrational or anti-intellectual but differently rational — it works with the whole person (intellect, emotion, intuition, body wisdom, and the deeper creative intelligence that Seth says underlies all these) rather than with the analytical intellect alone, producing results that the analytical approach cannot achieve precisely because it excludes the dimensions of the self that the magical approach includes.
The material in this book was delivered in the last years of Jane Roberts' life, as she was dealing with serious health challenges, and there is a quality of directness and urgency in these sessions that differs somewhat from the earlier Seth material. Seth is explicitly teaching Roberts herself — working with her specific beliefs, her specific relationship to her own health, and her specific creative challenges as a writer — in a way that makes this book both a practical handbook for the magical approach and a moving account of a teacher working with a student through the most difficult material in the most personally demanding circumstances.
What You'll Learn
• Understand the magical approach as Seth defines it: the specific qualities of mind and orientation (trust in one's own deeper intelligence, willingness to follow intuitive promptings before their logical justification is clear, the practice of 'magical thinking' as deliberate engagement with possibility rather than linear problem-solving) that constitute the magical approach — and how they differ from both wishful thinking and the rational approach that tends to discount them
• Grasp Seth's diagnosis of what the common-sense approach misses: the specific ways in which exclusive reliance on analytical reasoning restricts the range of solutions available to any problem, and how the inclusion of the other dimensions of the self (emotion, intuition, body wisdom) consistently produces more complete and more creative responses
• Recognise the health dimension: how Seth applies the magical approach specifically to the question of Roberts' health challenges — the specific beliefs he identifies as contributing to her physical difficulties, and the specific shift in orientation he prescribes — making this both a teaching about the magical approach and a deeply personal account of the relationship between consciousness and bodily experience
• Learn the creativity application: how Seth describes the creative process as the paradigm case of the magical approach in action — and how developing trust in the creative process across the widest range of one's activities is itself the practice of the magical approach
• Appreciate the intimacy of this material: how the context of personal crisis and genuine difficulty gives The Magical Approach a quality of human tenderness and urgency that distinguishes it from the more expository Seth books — making it, for many readers, the book that most directly addresses the experience of trying to live the Seth teaching in the face of genuine challenge
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