“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Long pause.) The entire picture of physical life as you understand it must be of course experienced from your own viewpoint, but its complexity, its order and magnificence of structure and design should be understood as composing but one example of the infinite number of realities, each constructed by the propensities and characteristics of its own nature and the nature of its own consciousness.

(9:16.) Give us a moment…. The nature of time, questions concerning the beginning or ending of the universe—these cannot be approached with any certainty by studying life’s exterior conditions, for the physical references themselves are merely the manifestations of inner psychological activity. You are aware of the universe only insofar as it impinges upon your perception. What lies outside of that perception remains unknown to you. It seems to you, then, that the world began—or must have begun—at some point in the past¹ (a one-minute pause at 9:18), but that is like supposing that one piece of a cake is the whole cake, which was baked in one oven and consumed perhaps in an afternoon.

(Very slowly.) Your numbering of the species is highly capricious. Again, you recognize as alive only those varieties of life that fall within certain ranges of attention. You objectify and diversify. The lines drawn between the self and what is nonself, between an organism and its environment, are highly arbitrary on your part. There are psychological patterns, therefore, that completely escape your notice because they do not follow the conventions that you have established. These combine what you diversify, so that you have hidden psychological values or psychological beings that combine the properties of the environment and the properties of selfhood in other combinations than those you know.

They would seem to be the spirits of nature,² as you would be more or less bound to interpret them from your viewpoint. They would certainly be psychological relatives, but with their own time schemes, languages, and psychological affiliations. These do exist along with the kinds of consciousness that you recognize within the structure of physical life. When you dream, however, you often come in contact with these cousins of consciousness. It is not simply that they communicate with you, or you with them, so much as it is that in sleep the conventional properties that you have learned are somewhat loosened and abandoned. You see “the lights around the corner,” so to speak. You see a species of consciousness, a species that must remain unexplained in any normal explanations of evolution, and these hint at the communications that exist at all levels (intently), protecting not only the genetic references necessary to your own kind, but the combinations of other forms of organization that exist adjacent to your own, yet connected to them. You have often misread such references, and many of your legends of good and evil spirits, monsters and strange varieties of artificial creatures, appear in folklore.