“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Your life seems synonymous with your consciousness. Therefore it appears that your knowledge of yourself grows gradually, as your self-consciousness develops from your birth. It appears, furthermore, that your consciousness will meet a death beyond which your self-consciousness will not survive. You may think longingly and with an almost hopeful nostalgia of the religion of your childhood, and remember a system of belief that ensured you of immortality. Yet most of you, my readers, yearn for some private and intimate assurances, and seek for some inner certainty that your own individuality is not curtly dismissed at death.

(9.35.) Each person knows intuitively that his or her own experiences somehow matter, and that there is a meaning, however obscured, that connects the individual with a greater creative pattern. Each person senses now and then a private purpose, and yet many are filled with frustration because that inner goal is not consciously known or clearly apprehended.

Though caught up in a life of seeming frustration, obsessed with family problems, uneasy in sickness, defeated it seems for all practical purposes, some portion of each individual rouses against all disasters, all discouragements, and now and then at least glimpses a sense of enduring validity that cannot be denied. It is to that knowing portion of each individual that I address myself. Period.

And even if you live in a desert, you take it on faith that there are indeed great cultivated fields and torrents of rain. It is true that some of your faith is based on knowledge. Others have traveled where you have not, and television provides you with images. Despite this, however, your senses present you with only a picture of your immediate environment, unless they are cultivated in certain particular manners that are relatively unusual.

You take it for granted that the earth has a history. In those terms, your own psyche has a history also. You have taught yourselves to look outward into physical reality, but the inward validity of your being cannot be found there — only its effects. You can turn on television and see a drama, but the inward mobility and experience of your psyche is mysteriously enfolded within all of those exterior gestures that allow you to turn on the television switch to begin with, and to make sense of the images presented. So the motion of your own psyche usually escapes you.

(10:55. A one-minute pause.) As you dwell in one particular city or town or village, you presently “live” in one small area of the psyche’s inner planet. You identify that area as your home, as your “I.” Mankind has learned to explore the physical environment, but has barely begun the greater inner journeys that will be embarked upon as the inner lands of the psyche are joyously and bravely explored. In those terms, there is a land of the psyche. However, this virgin territory is the heritage of each individual, and no domain is quite like any other. Yet there is indeed an inner commerce that occurs, and as the exterior continents rise from the inner structure of the earth, so the lands of the psyche emerge from an even greater invisible source.