“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

THE MANUFACTURE OF PERSONAL REALITY

We will call this evening’s essay “The Manufacture of Personal Reality.”

Experience is the product of the mind, the spirit, conscious thoughts and feelings, and unconscious thoughts and feelings. These together form the reality that you know. You are hardly at the mercy of a reality, therefore, that exists apart from yourself, or is thrust upon you. You are so intimately connected with the physical events composing your life experience that often you cannot distinguish between the seemingly material occurrences and the thoughts, expectations and desires that gave them birth.

(9:40.) You have the conscious mind for a good reason. You are not at the mercy of unconscious drives unless you consciously acquiesce to them. Your present feelings and expectations can always be used to check your progress. If you do not like your experience, then you must change the nature of your conscious thoughts and expectations. You must alter the kind of messages that you are sending through your thoughts to your own body, to friends and associates.

You may finally come to a half-understanding of the nature of reality and wail, “I believe that I have caused these ill effects, but I find myself unable to reverse them.”

The authors instead tell you to be positive, compassionate, strong, optimistic, filled with joy and enthusiasm, without telling you what to do to get out of the predicament you may be in, and without understanding the vicious circle that may seem to entrap you. Such books, again, while sometimes of value, do not explain how thoughts and emotions cause reality. They do not take into consideration the multidimensional aspects of the self or the fact that ultimately each personality, while following definite general laws, must still find and follow his or her own way of adapting these to personal circumstances.

If you are in poor health, you can remedy it. If your personal relationships are unsatisfactory, you can change them for the better. If you are in poverty, you can instead find yourself surrounded by abundance.

If you were born poor, or born sick, then it certainly seems to you that these circumstances were thrust upon you. Yet they were not, and to some extent or another they can be changed for the better.

This does not mean that effort is not required, and determination. It does mean that you are not powerless to change events and that each of you, regardless of your position, status, circumstances or physical condition, is in control of your own personal experience.

(10:26. Pause. Then softly, with a smile:) I am writing this book to help each individual solve his or her own personal problems. I hope to do this by showing you exactly the way in which you form your own reality, by explaining the ways in which you can alter it to your advantage.

I am not a physical personality. Basically, however, neither are you. Your experience now is physical. You are a creator translating your expectations into physical form. The world is meant to serve as a reference point. The exterior appearance is a replica of inner desire. You can change your personal world. You do change it without knowing it. You have only to use your ability consciously, to examine the nature of your thoughts and feelings and project those with which you basically agree.

They coalesce into the events with which you are so intimately familiar. I hope to teach you methods that will allow you to understand the nature of your own reality, and to point a way that will let you change that reality in whatever way you choose.

The book will explain how personal reality is formed, with great stress laid upon the ways of changing unfavorable aspects of individual experience.

It will, hopefully, avoid the Pollyanna attributes of many self-help books, and tease the reader into an enthusiastic desire to understand the characteristics of reality if only to solve his or her own problems. The methods given will be highly practical, workable, and within the abilities of any person genuinely concerned with those problems inherent in the nature of human existence.

The point will be made that all healings are the result of the acceptance of one basic fact: That matter is formed by those inner qualities that give it vitality, that structure follows expectation, that matter at any time can be completely changed by the activation of the creative faculties inherent in all consciousness.

(End at 10:47 p.m. Jane’s delivery as Seth had been quiet but rather fast, considering the modest speed I can attain while taking verbatim notes in my homemade shorthand. “I think I’ve got half of the title,” she said as soon as she was out of trance. “It’s The Nature of Personal Reality — hyphen or colon — then something else, but I didn’t get that part. All of a sudden I’m exhausted,” she added, laughing, “but don’t write that down.”

(A few notes, added later: Six months were to pass before we learned the rest of the title for Seth’s book. While Jane was resting before supper on October 25, 1972, the full name popped into her conscious mind: The Nature of Personal Reality: A Seth Book. We held the 623rd session, bridging Chapters Four and Five, that evening.