“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Through it all, however, we looked forward to our daily participation in Seth’s new book. Jane hadn’t looked at Seth Speaks for long periods during its production in order to avoid conscious involvement with it — but, she said recently, smiling, she plans to read and use this work session by session as she delivers it. Whatever nervousness she’d felt about producing it was minimal by now. I encouraged her new free attitude.

(I’ll indicate Jane’s various states of consciousness as I usually do in these sessions, but the notes can only be hints from an interested observer. The true variety and depth of the various realities and personalities she reaches are qualities that are uniquely hers, and they often defy the written word.)

The living picture of the world grows within the mind. The world as it appears to you is like a three-dimensional painting in which each individual takes a hand. Each color, each line that appears within it has first been painted within a mind, and only then does it materialize without.

In this case, however, the artists themselves are a portion of the painting, and appear within it. There is no effect in the exterior world that does not spring from an inner source. There is no motion that does not first occur within the mind.

The great creativity of consciousness is your heritage. It does not belong to mankind alone, however. Each living being possesses it, and the living world consists of a spontaneous cooperation that exists between the smallest and the highest, the greatest and the lowly, between the atoms and the molecules and the conscious, reasoning mind.

All manner of insects, birds and beasts cooperate in this venture, producing the natural environment. This is as normal and inevitable as the fact that your breath causes a mist to form on glass if you breathe upon it. All consciousness creates the world, rising out of feeling-tone. It is a natural product of what your consciousness is. Feelings and emotions emerge into reality in certain specific ways. Thoughts appear, growing on the bed already laid. The seasons spring up, formed by ancient feeling-tones, having deep and abiding rhythms. They are the result, again, of innate creative aspects that are a portion of all life.

(9:29. Intently:) The body of the earth can be said to have its own soul, or mind (whichever term you prefer). Using this analogy the mountains and oceans, the valleys and rivers and all natural phenomena spring from the earth’s soul, as all events and all manufactured objects appear from the inner mind or soul of mankind.

So does the human individual rise up in victorious distinctiveness from the ancient and yet ever-new fountains of its own soul. The self rises from unknowing into knowing, constantly surprising itself. As you read these sentences, for example, some of your knowledge is conscious knowing and is instantly available. Some is unconscious, but even the unconscious knowledge is knowing in its own unknowing.

Now: You are the living picture of yourself. You project what you think you are outward into flesh. Your feelings, your conscious and unconscious thoughts, all alter and form your physical image. This is fairly easy for you to understand.

You are aware, alert, and participating in many more realities than you know as your soul expresses itself through you. That consciousness of your usual daylight hours, the ego consciousness, rises up like a flower from the ground of the “underneath,” the unconscious bed of your own reality. Though you are not aware of it, this ego itself emerges, then falls back again into the unconscious, from which another ego then rises as a new bloom from the springtime earth.

(10:27.) You do not have the same ego now that you had five years ago, but you are not aware of the change. Ego rises out of what you are, in other words. It is a part of the action of your being and consciousness, but as the eye cannot see its own shifting colors and expressions, as it is not aware that it lives and dies constantly as its atomic structure changes, so you are not aware that the ego continually changes, dies, and is reborn.

The creative body consciousness creates the eye. The creative inner psyche creates the ego. The body forms the eye in the splendid wisdom of its great unconscious knowing. The psyche brings forth the ego that perceives psychologically as the eye perceives physically. Both the eye and the ego are formations focused toward perception of exterior reality.

Ruburt himself, unconsciously but also to some extent consciously, has been more intrigued with questions concerning consciousness and personality — the role of the ego consciousness, for example — since beginning his novel, Oversoul 7 (in late March, 1972).

If the books are children symbolically, then in those same terms his representation of my reality is a far more living, three-dimensional aspect. He has at various times wondered about schizophrenia, for example. He does not realize that on this level, now, and regardless of my independence and other issues involved, that he creates the personalities free of time, organizes them under the leadership of the conscious mind, and assigns them tasks of great validity and importance, which are then carried out.

This is creativity of a most specialized nature and allows him to probe, if he will, into the nature of consciousness, the psyche, and creativity in a way that few can. Now he himself set up the conditions that would make such results possible. A certain part of my reality is a portion of a certain part of his reality, and here the creation of what I seem to be takes place.