“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.

In your journeys into inner reality, you cannot proceed with these same root assumptions. Reality, per se, changes completely according to the basic root agreements that you accept. One of the root agreements upon which physical reality is based is the assumption that objects have a reality independent of any subjective cause and that these objects, within definite specified limitations, are permanent.

Objects may appear and disappear in these other systems. Using the root assumptions just mentioned as a basis for judging reality, an observer would insist that the objects were not real, for they do not behave as he believes objects must. Because dream images may appear and disappear, then, do not take it for granted that they do not really exist.

There is a cohesiveness to the inner universe and to the systems that are not basically physical. But this is based upon an entirely different set of root assumptions and these are the keys that alone will let you manipulate within other systems or understand them. There are several major root assumptions connected here and many minor ones:

5. Stability in time sequence is not a prerequisite requirement for an object, except as a root assumption in the physical universe.

Only if these basic root assumptions are taken for granted will your projection experiences make sense to you. Different rules simply apply. Your subjective experience is extremely important here; that is, the vividness of any given experience in terms of intensity will be far more important than anything else.

‘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.

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.

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 root assumptions that govern physical reality are indeed valid, but within physical reality alone. They do not apply elsewhere. There is a natural tendency to continue judging experience against these assumptions, however. With experience, the habit will lose much of its hold. Inner experience must be colored to some extent by the physical system, while you exist in it. In order for such data to rise to conscious levels, for example, it must be translated into terms that the ego can understand, and the translation is bound to distort the original experience. …

The whole physical organism of the body has been trained to react to certain patterns, these based on physical root assumptions. The nervous system reacts definitely to visual block images. Such images are received through the skin, as well as through the eyes. The whole system is highly complicated and organized. This is obviously necessary for physical survival. …

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.

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.

Astonished, I thrust my hand out the window, and the motion set ripples out, making fairly deep “cracks” near my fingers and more shallow ones farther away. The tree, I saw, was not only held up and supported by its roots deep in the earth, but by the air itself. Why had I ever thought that branches stayed up simply because this was how branches acted? The air itself helped hold them!