“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(The water, thick with topsoil, exuding a near-suffocating odor of petroleum effluents, became one foot deep in the yard, then three, then five…. Jane and I found ourselves experiencing a drastic new world, and although Seth hasn’t said so yet, I believe that to be one of the reasons we stayed. We sipped wine and used light self-hypnosis to take the edge off our tension, but as we watched the water crawl up the side of the old red-brick house next door, our new reality threatened to turn into a terrifying one indeed. Had we made the right decision?

There is no other valid way of changing physical events. It might help if you imagine an inner living dimension within yourself in which you create, in miniature psychic form, all the exterior conditions that you know. Simply put, you do exactly this. Your thoughts, feelings and mental pictures can be called incipient exterior events, for in one way or another each of these is materialized into physical reality.

Interactions with others do occur, of course, yet there are none that you do not accept or draw to you by your thoughts, attitudes, or emotions. This applies in each area of life. In your terms, it applies both before life and after it. In the most miraculous fashion are you given the gift of creating your experience.

(9:24.) The joy of creativity flows through you as effortlessly as your breath. From it the most minute areas of your outer experience spring. Your feelings have electromagnetic realities that rise outward, affecting the atmosphere itself. They group through attraction, building up areas of events and circumstances that finally coalesce, so to speak, either in matter as objects — or as events in “time.”

Space and time are both root assumptions, which simply means that man accepts both, and assumes that his reality is rooted in a series of moments and a dimension of space. So your inner experience is translated in those terms.

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.

(9:40.) If the doll sat on a bureau and this is also vividly recalled, then the space in which the doll sat still carries the impression of the doll, though other objects may be placed there. You react, therefore, not only to what is visible to your physical eyes in space, or to what is directly in front of you in time, but also to objects and events whose reality is still with you, though they may seem to have disappeared.

Basically you create your experience through your beliefs about yourself and the nature of reality. Another way to understand this is to realize that you create your experiences through your expectations. Your feeling-tones are your emotional attitudes toward yourself and life in general, and these generally govern the large areas of experience.

(Pause.) They give the overall emotional coloration that characterizes what happens to you. Period. You are what happens to you. Your emotional feelings are often transitory, but beneath there are certain qualities of feeling uniquely your own, that are like deep musical chords. While your day-to-day feelings may rise or fall, these characteristic feeling-tones lie beneath.

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.

Once you learn to get the feeling of your own inner tone, then you are aware of its power, strength and durability, and you can to some extent ride with it into deeper realities of experience.

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.

Within this framework you have full freedom to create your experience, your personal life in all of its aspects, the living picture of the world. Your personal life, and to some extent your individual living experience, help create the world as it is known in your time.

(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.

(Pause.) New paragraph: You make your own reality. There is no other rule. Knowing this is the secret of creativity.

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.

(End at 11:32 p.m. Jane was quickly out of an excellent dissociated state. “I’m glad Seth’s working on his book again,” she said. “I know it’s silly, but I feel a lot better. I was even wondering if my own attitude was holding the thing up now, after all of those other interruptions….” And so, like Seth Speaks, this is really two books in one: It’s not only about the nature of personal reality, but the circumstances surrounding Jane’s production of the material and the many ideas she has concerning it.

1. For those who have forgotten: Chromosomes are microscopic bodies into which the protoplasmic substance of a cell nucleus separates during cell division. They carry the genes, the “blueprints” that determine hereditary characteristics. Occasionally a footnote like this will be included in order to point up Seth’s own material. Often he’ll “take off” from such standard definitions in his own way.