“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Intrusions from the Interior Universe

Excerpts from “The Physical Universe
as Idea Construction”
My First Glimpse into the Interior Universe

One moment I sat at my desk with my paper and pen beside me. The next instant, my consciousness rushed out of my body, yet it was itself bodiless, taking up no space at all; it seemed to be merging with the air outside the window, plunging through the treetops, resting, curled within a single leaf. Exultation and comprehension, new ideas, sensations, novel groupings of images and words rushed through me so quickly there was no time to call out. There was no present, past or future: I knew this, suddenly, irrevocably.

Then, gradually, I became aware that my consciousness was settling back in my body again, but slowly, like dust motes descending through the evening air down to where my body sat upright at the table, head bent, fingers furiously scribbling notes about what was happening as if they had a mind of their own.

But then, as I returned, the intensity of the experience began to fade. The miracle began to withdraw. Three hours in all had passed. I was left with a pile of scribbled notes, written and titled automatically: “The Physical Universe As Idea Construction” — all that was physically salvaged from that remarkable experience. And I knew beyond all doubt that those ideas had been given to me initially in the forgotten dream of the night before.

Since those notes were born so directly from that event, and since they represent the first strong intrusions from the interior universe into my own life, I still find them intriguing. I am looking at them now, as I work on this chapter some five years later. They seemed charged with a fierce vitality that leads me to consider the ambiguous nature of creativity, for if those ideas and the experience itself initiated a new kind of consciousness in me, they also possessed an explosive force powerful enough to considerably dismantle the previous frameworks of my thoughts and ideas. The ordinary surface of my world literally quaked open, and I had no conception then of what was still to emerge.

In The Seth Material, I included only a few brief quotes from “The Physical Universe As Idea Construction,” but here I will go into that manuscript somewhat more thoroughly, since it is so close to the “raw form” that erupted from that experience and represents, in embryo, I believe, the material that Seth would later be giving us. The manuscript itself consisted of approximately forty pages of scribbled notes written during the height of the experience. Later I wrote fifty more pages as I tried to recapture the feelings and insights I’d had at the time.

Following are excerpts from “The Physical Universe As Idea Construction.” In the original manuscript, this entire portion came to me as definitions.

Energy is the basis of the universe.

Space is where our own idea constructions do not exist in the physical universe.

The individual is the part of the entity or whole self of which we are conscious in daily life. It is that part of the whole self which we are able to express or make “real” through our idea constructions on a physical level.

The subconscious is the threshold of an idea’s emergence into the individual conscious mind. It connects the entity and the individual.

Physical time is the apparent lapse between the emergence of an idea in the physical universe (as a construction) and its replacement by another.

The physical universe is the sum of individual idea constructions.

Evolution is energy’s movement toward conscious expression in the physical universe, but it is basically nonphysical. A species at any given time is the materialization of the inner images or ideas of its individual members, each of whom forms their own idea constructions.

The Universe as a Physical Body
(see diagram)

The matter of the universe can be conceived of as a physical body, an organism of individual cells (objects) held together by connective tissue (the chemicals and elements of air). This connective tissue is also alive and carries electrical impulses. Within it, as within the connective tissues of the human body, there is a certain elasticity, a certain amount of regeneration and a constant replacement of the atoms and molecules that compose it. While the whole retains its shape, the material itself is being constantly born and replaced.

This rough diagram “came” with the above material. It was supposed to represent the energy of the entity as it flowed outward through the subconscious to the conscious, in order to construct the physical image and environment in response to the self’s idea of what it was.

The reflection is brief, but for a moment the animal partakes of a new dimension. The shadow of time glimmers in his eyes as the still imperfected memory of past constructions lingers in his consciousness. As yet, memory storage is small, but now the instantaneous construction is no longer instantaneous, in our terms. There is a pause: the organism — dog or tiger — can choose to attack or not to attack. The amoeba must construct its small world without reflection and without time as we know it.

Entities with still broader range need more complicated structure. The scope of their receptivity is so large that the simple autonomic nervous system is not enough. The amoeba constructs each idea it receives, because it is able to receive so few. All must be constructed to ensure survival. With man, the opposite becomes true. He has such a range of receptivity that it is impossible for him to construct all of his ideas physically. As his scope widened, a mechanism was necessary that would allow him to choose. Self-consciousness and reason were the answers.

This new dimension enabled the species to manipulate and recognize its own constructions and freed it to focus greater energy in projecting some ideas over others. In other words, conscious purpose became possible, physically. Somewhere along the line, however, man began to divorce himself almost completely and artifically from his own constructions. Hence his groping, his sense of alienation from nature, his search for a Cause or Creator of a creation he no longer recognized as his own.