“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

THE MANUFACTURE OF PERSONAL REALITY

(“Ruburt sensed this quite clearly, and as usual feels twinges, wondering what I am going to write about and what kind of a book it will be. Such a book can be given quite normally and quietly along with your regular routine of sessions, adding to your own knowledge and ultimately helping others also. I suggest the simplest of formats; always the least complicated as far as any mechanics are concerned. Do you follow me?

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.

An examination of your conscious thoughts will tell you much about the state of your inner mind, your intentions and expectations, and will often lead you to a direct confrontation with challenges and problems. Your thoughts, studied, will let you see where you are going. They point clearly to the nature of physical events. What exists physically exists first in thought and feeling. There is no other rule.

Each thought has a result, in your terms. The same kind of thought, habitually repeated, will seem to have a more or less permanent effect. If you like the effect then you seldom examine the thought. If you find yourself assailed by physical difficulties, however, you begin to wonder what is wrong.

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.”

If this is the case, then regardless of what you have told yourself thus far, you still do not believe that you are the creator of your own experience. As soon as you recognize this fact you can begin at once to alter those conditions that cause you dismay or dissatisfaction.

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.

Whether or not you realize it, you have pursued your present course with determination, using many resources, for ends or reasons that at one time made sense to you. You may say, “Poor health makes no sense to me,” or, “A fractured relationship with my mate is hardly what I was after,” or, “I certainly have not been pursuing poverty after all my hard work.”

You see and feel what you expect to see and feel. The world as you know it is a picture of your expectations. The world as the race of man knows it is the materialization en masse of your individual expectations. As children come from your physical tissues, so is the world your joint creation.

(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.

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.

Please title what we have done this evening as my preface. The dictated portion, that is. I bid you a fond good evening.

(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.