“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

My work in this environment provides far more challenge than any of you know, and it also necessitates the manipulation of creative materials that are nearly beyond your present comprehension. I will say more of this shortly. First of all, you must understand that no objective reality exists but that which is created by consciousness. Consciousness always creates form, and not the other way around. So my environment is a reality of existence created by myself and others like me, and it represents the manifestation of our development.

They are created by our mental patterns, [just] as your own physical reality is created in perfect replica of your inner desires and thoughts. You think that objects exist independently of you, not realizing that they are instead the manifestations of your own psychological and psychic selves. We realize that we form our own reality, and therefore we do so with considerable joy and creative abandon. In my environment you would be highly disoriented, for it would seem to you as if it lacked coherency.

In other words, I may teach the same lesson in many different ways, according to the abilities and assumptions that are inherent in any given system in which I must operate. I use one portion of myself from many personalities that are available to my identity in these communications, and in this book. In other systems of reality, this particular Seth personality that I, the larger Seth identity adopt here, would not be understood.

All systems of reality are not physically oriented, you see, and some are entirely unacquainted with physical form. Nor is sex, as you understand it, natural to them. Therefore I would not communicate as a male personality who has lived many physical existences, though this is a legitimate and valid portion of my identity.

Now: In my home environment I assume whatever shape I please, and it may vary, and does, with the nature of my thoughts. You, however, form your own physical image at an unconscious level in more or less the same manner, but with some important differences. You usually do not realize that your physical body is created by you at each moment as a direct result of your inner conception of what you are, or that it changes in important chemical and electromagnetic ways with the ever-moving pace of your own thought.

Now: This ability to change form is an inherent characteristic of any consciousness. Only the degree of proficiency and actualization varies. You can see this in your own system, in a slowed-down version, when you observe the changing forms taken by living matter through its “evolutionary” history.

Now, we can also take several forms at one time, so to speak, but you can also do this although you do not generally realize it. Your physical form can lie sleeping and inert upon the bed while your consciousness travels in a dream form to places quite distant. Simultaneously you may create a “thought-form” of yourself, identical in every respect, and this may appear in the room of a friend quite without your conscious awareness. So consciousness is not limited as to the forms it can create at any given time.

Practically speaking, we are rather more advanced along these lines than you, and when we create such forms we do so with complete awareness. I share my field of existence with others who have more or less the same challenges to meet, the same overall pattern of development. Some I have known and others I have not. We communicate telepathically, but then again, telepathy is the basis for your languages, without which their symbolism would be meaningless.

I will explain these inner senses to you later, at the end of this chapter. Suffice it here to say that we have strong emotional experience, although it differs in a large measure from your own. It is far less limited and far more expansive in that we are also aware and responsive to the emotional “climate” as a whole. We are much freer to feel and experience, because we are not so afraid of being swept away by feeling.