“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

When you are born, you understand that you have a new consciousness. You explore its ramifications. It is your primary evidence that you exist in flesh. Basically, each person must confront the experience of reality through a direct encounter with it. This encounter takes place through the use of the physical senses, of course, as they are used to perceive and interpret physical data. The very utilization of those senses, however, is dependent upon the nature of your consciousness itself, and that consciousness is aware of its power and action through the exercise of its own properties.

Those “properties” are the faculties of the imagination, creativity, telepathy, clairvoyance, and dreaming, as well as the functions of logic and reason. You know that you dream. You know that you think. Those are direct experiences. (Pause.) Anytime you use instruments to probe into the nature of reality, you are looking at a kind of secondary evidence, no matter how excellent the instruments may be. The subjective evidence of dreaming, for example, is far more “convincing” and irrefutable than is the evidence for an expanding universe, black holes, or even atoms and molecules themselves. Although instruments can indeed be most advantageous in many ways, they still present you with secondary rather than primary tools of investigation—and they distort the nature of reality far more than the subjective attributes of thoughts, feelings, and intuitions do.

(9:21.) The human consciousness has not, therefore, developed the best and most proper “tool” with which to examine the nature of reality. It is because you have used other methods that much evidence escapes you—evidence that would show that the physical universe exists in quite different terms than is supposed.

Evidence for reincarnation is quite available. There are enough instances of it, known and tabulated, to make an excellent case; and beside this there is evidence that remains psychologically invisible in your private lives, because you have been taught not to concentrate in that direction.

There is enough evidence to build an excellent case for life after death. All of this involves direct experience—episodes, encountered by individuals, [that are] highly suggestive of the after death hypothesis; but the hypothesis is never taken seriously by your established sciences. There is far more evidence for reincarnation and life after death than there is, for example, for the existence of black holes. (With amusement:) Few people have seen a black hole, to make the most generous statement possible, while countless people have had private reincarnational experiences, or encounters that suggest the survival of the personality beyond death.