“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Dictation. Now: Man’s first encounter with physical reality in life is his experience with the state of his own consciousness.

He is aware of a different kind of being. He encounters his consciousness first, and then he encounters the world—so I am saying, of course, that each person has an identity that is larger than the framework of consciousness with which you are usually familiar in life.

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.

Those experiences are usual. They have been reported by peoples of all kinds and in all ages, and they represent a common-sense kind of knowledge that is frowned upon by the men of learned universities. Throughout this book we will often be talking about experiences that are encountered in one way or another by most people, but are not given credence to on the part of the established fields of knowledge. Therefore, dreams will be considered throughout the book in various capacities as they are related through genetics, reincarnation, culture, and private life. We will also be considering the matter of free will and its role in individual value fulfillment.