“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

4. Objects are blocks of energy perceived in a highly specialized manner.

Elements from past, present and future may be indiscriminately available to you. You may be convinced that a given episode is the result of subconscious fabrication, simply because the time sequence is not maintained, and this could be a fine error. In a given dream projection, for example, you may experience an event that is obviously from the physical past, yet within it there may be elements that do not fit. In an old-fashioned room of the 1700’s, you may look out and see an automobile pass by. Obviously, you think: distortion. Yet you may be straddling time in such an instance, perceiving, say, the room as it was in the 1700’s and the street as it appears in your present. These elements may appear side by side. The car may suddenly disappear before your eyes, to be replaced by an animal or the whole street may turn into a field.

‘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 physical experience, you are dealing with an environment with which you are familiar. You have completely forgotten the chaos and unpredictable nature it presented before learning processes were channeled into its specific directions. You learned to perceive reality in a highly specified fashion. When you are dealing with inner, or basically non-physical realities, you must learn to become unspecialized and then learn a new set of principles. You will soon learn to trust your perceptions, whether or not the experiences seem to make logical sense.

The unity, you see, is different. Basically, perception of the spacious present is naturally available. It is your nervous physical mechanism which acts as a limiting device. By acting in this manner it forces you to focus upon what you can perceive with greater intensity.

You are basically capable of seeing any particular location as it existed a thousand years in your past or as it will exist a thousand years in your future. The physical senses serve to blot out more aspects of reality than they allow you to perceive … yet, in many inner explorations you will automatically translate experience into terms that the senses can use. … Any such translation is, nevertheless, a second-hand version of the original — an important point to remember.

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.

Physically speaking, you will find nothing to contradict these assumptions, since they are all that you can experience or perceive physically. These root assumptions are the framework of the camouflage system. As you explore other realities, you almost automatically interpret such data in terms of the root assumptions of your own system.

The inner senses alone are equipped to process and perceive other reality systems. Even the distortions can be kept at a minimum with training. Indiscriminate use of the psychedelic drugs can severely shake up learned patterns of response that are necessary for effective manipulation within physical reality; break subtle connections and you disturb electromagnetic functions. Ego failure can result.

Development of the inner senses is a much more effective method of perceiving other realities, and, followed correctly, the ego is not only stronger but more flexible. Even consciousness of physical reality is increased. Such development becomes an unfolding and natural expansion of the whole personality.

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 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.

As a rule, you see, there is little communication within the uncamouflaged areas. They act as boundaries, even while they represent the basic stuff of which all camouflage is composed. (Without the camouflage, you would perceive nothing with the physical senses.)

The sentence is really meaningless, however, because the physical senses are themselves camouflage. There would be nothing to translate. It is only the inner senses that will allow you to perceive under these circumstances. Theoretically, if you can bridge the gap between various reincarnations, then you can bridge the gap between your system and another.

The completely uncamouflaged layer would be rather bewildering. You might automatically be tempted to project images into it. They would not take, so to speak, but would appear and disappear with great rapidity. This is a silent area. Thoughts would not be perceived here, as a rule, for the symbols for them would not be understood.

If a certain intensity is reached, however — a peak of intensity — then you could perceive the spacious present as it exists within your native system. You could, from this peak, look into other systems, but you would not understand what you perceived, not having the proper root assumptions. I have used the idea of neighboring systems for simplicity’s sake, as if they were laid out end to end. Obviously, such is not the case. The systems [of reality] are more like the various segments of a tangerine, with the uncamouflaged boundary areas like the white membrane between the tangerine sections.

Nor do such projections necessarily involve journeys through space as you know it. There are systems, vivid in intensity, that have no existence in physical reality at all. It is now thought, I believe, that time and space are basically one, but they are both a part of something else. They are merely the camouflage patterns by which you perceive reality. Space as you perceive it in the dream state comes much closer to the reality.

Each brushstroke of a painting represents concentrated experience and compressed perceptions. In a good painting, these almost explode when perceived by the lively consciousness of another. The observer is washed over by intensities. The excellent work of art recreates for the observer inner experience of his own, also, of which he has never been aware. As you know, paintings have motion, yet the painting itself does not move. This idea should help you understand experience in terms of intensities and projections or the movement of consciousness without necessarily motion through space.

Cautiousness and wonder made me pause. For one thing, the air inside the room was normal. For another, I felt as if I was observing a legitimate glimpse of air from the framework of a different kind of perception. Was this in some way air slowed down? And if so, was my “body” in the same state? Was this what air was really like and was it perceived this way by certain kinds of consciousness or at particular stages of molecular activity? All of these thoughts went through my mind, but before I could figure out what other experiments I could try, I snapped back to my body.