“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You will question, most likely, “Becoming what?” for to you it usually seems that all motion tends toward a state of completion of one kind or another. You think, therefore, in terms of becoming perfect, or becoming free. The word “becoming” by itself seems to leave you up in the air, so to speak, suspended without definitions. If I say: “You are becoming what you already are,” then my remark sounds meaningless, for if you already are, how can you become what is already accomplished? In larger terms, however, what you are is always vaster than your knowledge of yourself, for in physical life you cannot keep up with your own psychological and psychic activity.

Pretend that your life’s experience is a page of a book that you write, read, and experience from top to bottom, left to right, sentence by sentence, paragraph by paragraph. That is the you that you know — the world view that you understand. But other quite as legitimate “yous” may write, read, and experience the same page backwards, or read each letter downward and back up again, as you would a column of figures. Or others might mix and match the letters in entirely different fashions altogether, forming entirely different sentences. Still another, vaster you might be aware of all the different methods of experiencing that particular page, which is your life as you understand it.

You think that your own consciousness is the only logical culmination of your body’s reality. You read yourself in a certain accepted fashion. In the “entire book of life,” however, just physically speaking, there are interrelationships on adjacent levels that you do not perceive, as other portions of your own biological consciousness or biological language relate to the entire living fabric of the world. In physical terms you are alive because of substructures — psychic, spiritual, and biological — of which you have hardly any comprehension at all.

(Long pause.) You read yourselves from the top of the page to the bottom, or from what you think of as the beginning to the end. Your greater reality, however, is read in terms of intensities, so that the psyche puts you together in a different way. The psyche does not mark time. To it the intense experiences of your life exist simultaneously. In your terms they would be the psyche’s present. The psyche deals with probable events, however, so some events — perhaps some that you dreamed of but did not materialize — are quite real to the psyche. They are far more real to it than most innocuous but definite physical events, as for example yesterday morning’s breakfast.

The inner events of the psyche compose the greater experience from which physical events arrive. They cast an aura that almost magically makes your life your own. Even if two people encountered precisely the same events in their lives at precisely the same time, their experiences of reality would still hardly be approximately connected.

If you “read yourselves” sideways in such a manner, you would discover portions of your own consciousness stretching out across the entire fabric of the earth as you understand it — becoming a part of the earth’s material, even as those materials become part of the self that you recognize. Your consciousness would be far less hemmed in. Time would expand adjacently. You think of yourselves physically as “top dogs,” however, separate from the other species and kinds of life, so that in effect you limit your own experience of your psyche.

If you thought or felt in such a fashion, then you would appreciate the fact that biologically your body is yours by virtue of the mineral, plant and animal life from which it gains its sustenance. You would not feel imprisoned as you often do within one corporal form, for you would understand that the body itself maintains its relative stability because of its constant give-and-take with the materials of the earth that are themselves possessed of consciousness.

(Long pause at 10:47.) When you ask: “Who am I?” you are trying to read yourself as if you were a simple sentence already written. Instead, you write yourself as you go along. The sentence that you recognize is only one of many probable variations. You and no other choose which experiences you want to actualize. You do this as spontaneously as you speak words. You take it for granted that a sentence begun will be finished. You are in the midst of speaking yourself. The speaking, which is your life, seems to happen by itself, since you are not aware of keeping yourself alive. Your heart beats whether or not you understand anatomy.