“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You agree to accept certain data in the physical universe. You agree to form this into certain patterns, and you agree to ignore other data completely. These now, called root assumptions, form the main basis for the apparent permanence and coherence of your physical system.

‘This is how dreams work,’ you may think. ‘This cannot be a legitimate projection.’ Yet you may be perceiving the street and the field that existed ‘before’ it, and the images may be transposed one upon the other. If you try to judge such an experience with physical root assumptions, it will be meaningless. As mentioned earlier, you may also perceive a building that will never exist in physical reality. This does not mean that the form is illusion. You are simply in a position where you can pick up and translate the energy pattern before you.

If another individual under the same circumstances comes across the same ‘potential’ object, he can also perceive it as you did. He may, however, because of his own make-up, perceive and translate another portion of allied pattern. He may see the form of the man who originated the thought of the building.

To a large extent in the physical system, your habit of perceiving time as a sequence forms the type of experience and also limits it. This habit also unites the experiences, however. The unifying and limiting aspects of consecutive moments are absent in inner reality. Time, in other words, cannot be counted upon to unify action. The unifying elements will be those of your own understanding and abilities. You are not forced to perceive action as a series of moments within inner reality, therefore.

In a projection, the problems will be of a different sort. The form of a man, for example, may be a thought-form, or a fragment sent quite unconsciously by another individual whom it resembles. It may be another projectionist, like yourself. It may be a potential form like any potential object… a record of a form played over and over again.

It may be another version of yourself. We will discuss ways of distinguishing between these. A man may suddenly appear, and be then replaced by a small girl. This would be a nonsensical development to the logical mind; yet, the girl might be the form of the man’s previous or future reincarnated self.

Your mental processes are formed and developed as a result of this conditioning. The intuitive portions of the personality are not so formed, and these will operate to advantage in any inner exploration.

The images and forms Seth speaks about in that session would not disappear when you banished your own hallucinations, as mentioned earlier. In the next session, Seth explained more about root assumptions and for the first time mentioned psychedelic experience in connection with projection.

Root assumptions represent the basic premises upon which a given existence-system is formed. These are the ground rules, so to speak. Your physical mechanisms are equipped to function in such a way that reality is perceived through the lens of particular root assumptions, then. Using the physical senses, it is almost impossible for you to perceive reality in any other way.

These root assumptions are so a part of your existence that they cloud your dreams. Beneath them, however, portions of the self perceive physical reality in an entirely different fashion, free of the tyranny of objects and physical form. Here you experience concepts directly, without the need for symbols. You have knowledge of your ‘past’ personalities and know that they exist simultaneously with your own.

The root assumptions upon which physical reality is formed represent secure ground to the ego. We always operate with the ego’s consent. It interprets the inner knowledge gained in its own way, true, but it is immeasurably enriched by so doing.

The ego can exist only within the context of these assumptions. The primary dream experience is finally woven into a structure composed of these assumptions, and it is these you remember. These serve you as basic information but the information is in symbolic form. Objects, you see, are symbols. Dream objects are often symbols of realities that the ego could not otherwise perceive.

“You’re normally awake,” Rob said. “The plant is ours. You just forgot about it.” So I accepted his statement and never even wondered that he might be a thought-form of mine.

There is constant translation of inner reality into objects in the waking state and a constant translation of ideas into pseudo-objects in the dream state. Within a certain range of dream reality, ideas and thoughts can be translated into pseudo-objects and transported. This is what happens when you adopt a pseudo-form in projection, though I am simplifying this considerably.

Once more: The undifferentiated layers are composed of the vitality that forms the camouflage of all systems. Such an area is not really a thing in itself, but a portion of vitality that contains no camouflage, and is therefore unrecognizable to those within any given system. You are in touch with infinity in such areas, since it is only camouflage that gives you the conception of time. …