“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

It deals with a different kind of experience than the one with which you are physically familiar, although that experience is also a part of the psyche. Daily life is a focus taken on the part of that portion of the psyche you call you, and there are many other such focuses. The psyche is never destroyed. Nor is that unique individuality of your own ever minimized. The psyche’s experiences straddle your ideas of time, however. It seems to you quite definitely that you come alive and die. At your particular focus of consciousness, no arguments will suffice to convince you otherwise, for you are everywhere presented with the physical evidence of “fact.” Period.

(10:07.) Your own waking consciousness deals specifically with certain kinds of distinctions. These help form the very structure of physical existence. They highlight your lives, providing them also with a kind of frame. Quite simply, you want to experience a certain kind of reality, so you put boundaries about events, that allow you to concentrate upon them. When an artist paints a picture, he uses discrimination. He or she chooses one area of concentration. Everything within the painting fits; so in your physical lives, you do the same thing.

I often speak of you and the psyche as if they were separate, yet of course this is not the case. You are that portion of the psyche that you presently recognize. Many people say: “I want to know myself,” or “I want to find myself,” when the truth is that few really want to take the time or effort. (Pause.) There is one place to begin, however: Try becoming better acquainted with the self you are now. Stop telling yourself that you do not know yourself.

If, however, you learn to know yourself better in daily life to become more fully aware even of your earthly life, then you will indeed receive other information that hints of a deeper, more supportive reality, in which physical existence rests. You will find yourself having experiences that do not fit recognized facts. These can add up to an alternate set of facts, pointing toward a different kind of reality, and give evidence for an inner existence that takes precedence over the physical assumptions. A certain kind of discretion and understanding is necessary, however. Basically the inner reality is the creative source of the physical one. Yet to some extent, the physical rules are also inviolate — at their level.

In Joseph’s dream, his brother’s features had an Oriental cast. Joseph knew that his brother lived as himself, and also as an Oriental, unknown to Joseph in his present life. If Joseph had seen two people — one his brother and one an Oriental — he would not have recognized the stranger, so in the dream his brother’s known appearance dominated, while the Oriental affiliation is merely suggested. In your own lives you will use such psychic shorthand, or utilize symbols in which you try to explain the greater dimensions of one reality in terms of the known one.

You normally organize your experience in terms of time. Your usual stream of consciousness is also highly associative, however. Certain events in the present will remind you of past ones, for example, and sometimes your memory of the past will color present events.

Association or no, physically you will remember events in time, with present moments neatly following past ones. The psyche deals largely with associative processes, however, as it organizes events through association. Time as such has little meaning in that framework. Associations are tied together, so to speak, by emotional experience. In a large manner, the emotions defy time.