“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

They are the smallest imaginable “packages” of consciousness that you can imagine, and despite any ideas to the contrary, basically consciousness has nothing to do with size. If that were the case, it would take more than a world-sized globe to contain the consciousness of simply one cell.

So your physical life is the result of a spectacular spontaneous order—the order of the body spontaneously formed by the units of consciousness. Your experience of the world is largely determined by your imaginations and your reasoning abilities. These did not develop through time, as per usual evolutionary beliefs. Both imagination and reason belonged to the species from the beginning, but the species has used these qualities in different ways throughout what you think of as historic time. There is great leeway in that direction, so that the two can be combined in many many alternate fashions, each particular combination giving you its own unique picture of reality, and determining your experience in the world.

(9:02.) Man, then, has sometimes stressed the power of the imagination and let its great dramatic light illuminate the physical events about him, so that they were largely seen through its cast. Exterior events in those circumstances become magnets attracting the dramatic force of the imagination. Inner events are stressed over exterior ones. The objects of the world then become important not only for what they are but because of their standing in an inner world of meaning. In such cases, of course, it becomes quite possible to go so far in that direction that the events of nature almost seem to disappear amid the weight of their symbolic content.

In recent times the trend has been in the opposite direction, so that the abilities of the imagination were considered highly suspect, while exterior events were considered the only aspects of reality. You ended up with a true-or-false kind of world, in which it seemed that the answers to the deepest questions about life could be answered quite correctly and adequately by some multiple-choice test. Man’s imagination seemed then to be allied with falsehood, unless its products could be turned to advantage in the materialistic existence. In that context, the imagination was tolerated at all only because it sometimes offered new technological inventions.

The man who wrote wants to live largely in his own world. He hurts no one. He supports himself a good deal of the time. His view of reality is eccentric from most viewpoints. He adds a flavor to the world that would be missing otherwise, and through his very eccentricity, to some extent he shows other people that their rigid views of reality may indeed have chinks in them here and there.

I do not mean to idealize him either, or others of his kind, but to point out that you can use your imaginations and intellects in other fashions than you do. In fact, such fashions are not only genetically possible, but genetically probable—a matter I will discuss later in the book. The imagination, of course, deals with the implied universe, those vast areas of reality that are not physically manifest, while reason usually deals with the evidence of the world that is before it. That statement is generally true, but specifically, of course, any act of the imagination involves reasoning, and any [act] of reason involves the imagination.