“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

I have said this before also. If you were able to focus your attention upon the dissimilarities, merely those that you can perceive but do not, then you would be amazed that mankind could form any idea of an organized reality. I look now between the two of you (looking at the couch where Natalie S. and Arnold were sitting). When the others look at our friends here on the fancy blue couch, they see a picture of true organization. There is an individual here and an individual here on the blue couch with space between. The picture is equalized. It appears perfect and organized. However, the space between our two friends is not vacant. You merely perceive it as vacant because you do not perceive what is there. And so the picture is very organized.

As soon as you realize however that the picture is not complete, then you must begin to ask new questions, and the old idea of the perfect organization is gone. Now as you know, you do not perceive the atoms and molecules that swim about the room nor the atoms and molecules that fill this space between our friends, nor the forces—the field forces—that exist. The couch serves to unite them since they sit upon it. And what do they sit upon? Do you all know—emptiness that you perceive as solidity. Now, without your particular physical perfection you would not perceive the couch as solid. And consciousness that has different perceptive mechanisms than your own is unaware of our now famous blue couch. You make the organization your thoughts perceive as organization. You enforce the organization and indeed create it.

([Arnold:] “Do we all create the same organization and see the same couch?”)

Now, you each generally agree, I am sure, that you sit upon a couch. You do not perceive the same couch. You only perceive your own idea constructions. You cannot perceive those of another. Telepathically you transpose your ideas in line with what you know of the other person’s thinking. You agree that the couch is here. Now, it is true that within your physical system—for I know this will come next from our friend Florence—you can measure your couch. I expect at any moment anyone will get a ruler and measure it and then say to me that the couch is so long—how can you say it is not one couch? However, within your physical system the instruments themselves are distorted and, of course, they will agree with what they measure. There is no reason why they should not. Telepathically you all agree upon the placement of objects and their dimensions.

Now, you use atoms and molecules in a strange way. You transpose your ideas upon them. You perceive them in a certain fashion. Now, I am not blaming you. I have done it too in my time, and there is a good reason for it. But the fact is that physical matter is not solid except when you believe that it is. And that organization is transposed from within upon the without. It is not transposed from the without upon you. You form the reality that you know, and even though the table holds up your arms and you may lean upon it and write, I still tell you that the table is not solid. This makes little difference as long as you can write upon it. It makes little difference as long as you can sit upon your couch. But when you leave your physical system, and when physical perception is no longer the rule—then you must learn new root assumptions. Root assumptions are those meaning laws upon which you agree in any system of reality.