“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Jane and I decided to remain behind when, finally, last minute requests to evacuate our section of Elmira were made before dawn. Our decision, of course, contained deeply symbolic meanings for us that we still only partially understand. The Chemung River passes less than a block from our apartment house on its way through the center of the city, but since we lived on the second floor we thought we’d be secure. The house was solid, we decided. The neighborhood emptied itself except for us, and became extremely quiet.

(We were lucky compared to many others in the city. We’d lost our car, but we had a place to live and had all of our paintings, manuscripts and records, including the fifty-three volumes of the Seth material, intact. Since we occupy two apartments in order to have enough living and working space, we had room to take in a couple who had been flooded out. The weather was cold and rainy. Our days became a routine of actions devoted to survival, although Jane finished Oversoul 7 early in July, and resumed her classes. This book was put aside for a long time.

Your experience in the world of physical matter flows outward from the center of your inner psyche. Then you perceive this experience. Exterior events, circumstances and conditions are meant as a kind of living feedback. Altering the state of the psyche automatically alters the physical circumstances.

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.

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.

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.

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.