“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In those frameworks you have made certain classifications that now appear quite obvious. Common sense upholds them, and it seems impossible to consider reality otherwise. Yet by their nature such categories structure your experience of reality itself to such an extent that any alternate ways of perceiving life seem not only untrustworthy, but completely impossible.

If your purpose is to comprehend what other living creatures perceive, then the methods you are using are at the best shortsighted, and at the worst they completely defeat your purpose. For example: No matter what information or data you receive as the result of animal experimentation or dissection for scientific purposes, and no matter how valuable the results appear to be, the consequences of such methods are so distorted that you comprehend less of life than you did before.

Your present methods will simply bring you pat, manufactured results and answers. They will satisfy neither the intellect nor the soul. Since your universe springs from an inner one, and since that inner one pervades each nook and cranny of your own existence, you must look where you have not before — into the reality of your own minds and emotions. You must look to the natural universe that you know. You must look with your intuitions and creative instincts at the creatures about you, seeing them not as other species with certain habits, not as inferior properties of the earth, to be dissected, but as living examples of the nature of the universe, in constant being and transformation.

Thoughts spring into your mind as the objective universe swims into reality — that is, in the same fashion. Diagramming sentences tells you little about the spoken language, and nothing about those miraculous physical and mental performances that allow you to speak — and so diagramming the species of the world is, in the same way, quite divorced from any true understanding.

The subjective feeling of your being, your intimate experience from moment-to moment — these possess the same mysterious quality that it seems to you the universe possesses. You are mortal, and everywhere encounter evidence of that mortality, and yet within its framework your feelings and thoughts have a reality to you personally that transcends all such classifications. You know that physically you will die, yet each person at one time or another is secretly sure that he or she will not meet such a fate, and that life is somehow eternal.

In a larger level of actuality, then, there is no beginning or end to the universe, and at that level there are no contradictions. There is no beginning or end to the psyche, either. You may say: “Granted,” yet persist, saying: “In our terms, however, when did the world begin, and in what manner?” Yet the very attempt to place such an origin in time makes almost any answer distorted.

For that matter, an athlete may have a great zest for motion and an impatience with reading, caring not what within the body makes it move as long as its performance is superb — while an invalid with great book knowledge about all of the body’s parts is quite unable to physically perform in a normal manner.

If it were scientifically inclined, the body would know that such spontaneous performance was impossible, for science cannot explain the reality of life itself in its present form, much less its origins.

Consciousness within the body knows that its existence is within the body’s context, and apart from it at the same time. In ordinary life during the day consciousness often takes a recess, so to speak — it daydreams, or otherwise experiences itself as somewhat apart from the body’s reality. At night, in sleep, the self’s consciousness takes longer, freer recesses from physical reality, and does this as spontaneously as the body itself walks. These experiences are not hypothetical. They happen to each person. On such occasions, each person is to some extent aware of a kind of comprehension that is not dependent upon the accumulation of data, but of a deeper kind of experience and direct encounter with the reality from which the world emerges.

This is the kind of wordless knowledge the body possesses, that brings forth your physical motion and results in the spectacular preciseness of bodily response. It is, then, highly practical. In your terms, the same force that formed the world forms your subjective reality now, and is a source of the natural universe.

Exploring those realities lovingly will bring you into direct contact with inner dimensions of your being, providing intuitive understandings that are of greatest import.