“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Even the duration of an event or object in space or time is determined by the intensity of the thoughts or emotions that gave it birth. Duration in space is not the same as duration in time, however, though it may seem that this is the case. I am speaking in your terms now. An event or object that exists briefly in space may have a much greater duration in time. It may have far greater importance and intensity, existing in your memory, for example, long after it has disappeared in space. Such an event or object does not merely exist symbolically within your mind or memory — but in your terms its actual reality continues as a time event.

Nor is its reality in space annihilated as long as it exists within your mind. Let us take a very simple example. A child has been told not to play with a doll. The order is disobeyed. The child, wittingly or unwittingly, breaks the doll, and it is finally thrown away. The doll exists in time quite vitally as long as the child or the adult-to-be remembers it.

Everything that you experience has consciousness, and each consciousness is endowed with its own feeling-tone. There is great cooperation involved in the formation of the earth as you think of it, and so the individual living structures of the planet rise up from the feeling-tone within each atom and molecule.

Your flesh springs about you in response to these inner chords of your being, and the trees, rocks, seas and mountains spring up as the body of the earth from the deep inner chords within the atoms and molecules, which are also living. Because of the creative cooperation that exists, the miracle of physical materialization is performed so smoothly and automatically that consciously you are not aware of your part in it.

While your feeling-tone is uniquely yours, still it is expressed in a certain fashion that is shared by all consciousnesses focused in physical reality. So in those terms you spring from the earth as all the other creatures and natural living structures. You are, while physical, a portion of nature, therefore, not apart from it.

Trees and rocks possess their own consciousness, and also share a gestalt consciousness, even as the living portions of your body. The cells and organs have their own awarenesses, and a gestalt one. So the race of man also has individual consciousness and a gestalt or mass consciousness, of which you individually are hardly aware.

The mass race consciousness, in its terms, possesses an identity. You are a portion of that identity while still being unique, individual and independent. You are confined only to the extent that you have chosen physical reality, and so placed yourself within its context of experience. While physical, you follow physical laws, or assumptions. These form the framework for corporeal expression.

(11:00.) In this book we will be speaking about your own subjective world, and your part in the creation of events both private and shared. It is important before we continue that you realize that consciousness is within all physical phenomena, however. It is vital that you realize your position within nature. Nature is created from within. The personal life that you know rises up from within you, yet it is given. Period. Since you are a part of Being, then in a certain fashion you give yourself the life that is being lived through you.

I have spoken of “you,” yet this must not be confused with the “you” that you often think you are — the ego alone, for the ego is only a portion of You; it is that expert part of your personality that deals directly with the contents of your conscious mind, and is concerned most directly with the material portions of your experience.

The ego is a very specialized portion of your greater identity. It is a portion of you that arises to deal directly with the life that the larger You is living. The ego can feel cut off, lonely and frightened, however, if the conscious mind lets the ego run away with it. The ego and the conscious mind are not the same thing. The ego is composed of various portions of the personality — it is a combination of characteristics, ever-changing, that act in unitary fashion — the portion of the personality that deals most directly with the world.

(Very slowly at 11:18:) The conscious mind is an excellent perceiving attribute, a function that belongs to inner awareness but in this case is turned outward toward the world of events. Through the conscious mind the soul looks outward. Left alone, it perceives clearly.

In certain terms, the ego is the eye through which the conscious mind perceives, or the focus through which it views physical reality. But the conscious mind automatically changes its focus throughout life. The ego, while appearing the same to itself, ever changes. It is only when the conscious mind becomes rigid in its direction, or allows the ego to take on some of its own functions, that difficulties arise. Then the ego allows the conscious mind to work in certain directions and blocks its awareness in others.

And so it is from your larger identity that you form the reality that you know. It is up to you to do this with joy and vigor, clearing your conscious mind so that the deeper knowledge of your greater identity can form joyous expressions in the world of the flesh.