“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In this reality, you very nicely emphasize all the similarities which bind you together; you make a pattern of them, and you very nicely ignore all the dissimilarities. Out of a vast field of perception, you choose to focus your attention upon certain specific areas and to ignore all others, and so there is perfect agreement among you as far as this small area is concerned. The vastness that you do not perceive does not bother you at all, and you do not ask questions about it. And yet it exists.

I have said this before: If you were able to focus your attention upon the dissimilarities, merely those that you can perceive but do not, then you would be amazed that mankind can form any idea of an organized reality. (As Seth, Jane looked at the couch, where Mary and Art were sitting.) I look now between the two of you. When the others look at our friends here on the fancy blue couch, they see a picture of true organization. There is an individual there (pointing), and an individual there, with space between. The picture is equalized. It appears perfect and organized.

However, the space between our two friends is not vacant. You think of it as vacant because you do not perceive what is there. The picture appears to be very organized. As soon as you realize that the picture is not complete, however, then you must begin to ask new questions, and the old idea of the perfect organization is gone.

Now: As you know, you do not perceive the atoms and molecules that swim about the room, nor those that fill the space between our two friends, nor the forces — the field forces — that exist. The couch serves to unite them since they sit upon it. And what do they sit upon? Emptiness that you perceive as solidity.

Now without your particular physical senses you would not perceive the couch as solid. Consciousness that has different perceptive mechanisms than your own is unaware of our now famous blue couch. You make the organization. Your thoughts perceive an organization. You enforce the organization, and indeed create it.

(To Mary and Art): You each generally agree, I am sure, that you sit upon a couch. You do not perceive the same couch. You only perceive your own idea constructions. You cannot see those of another. Telepathically, you transpose your ideas in line with what you know of the other person’s thinking. You agree that the couch is here. Now it is true that within your physical system — for I know this will come next — you can measure your couch. I expect at any moment that someone will get a ruler and measure it, and then say to me that the couch is so long: How can I say it is not one couch?

Now: You use atoms and molecules in a strange way. You transpose your ideas upon them. You perceive them in a certain fashion. I am not blaming you. I have done it too, in my time, and there is good reason for it. But the fact is that physical matter is not solid except when you believe that it is, and that organization is transposed from within upon the without. It is not transposed from the without upon you. You form the reality that you know, and even though the table holds up your arms and you may lean upon it and write, I still tell you that the table is not solid.