“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

(Ordinarily this session would have been held yesterday, but Jane wanted to try it on a Thursday for variety. Before the session she said, “I still get stage fright when I think of Seth doing this book on his own.” And when the session began, Seth did at once resume work on “his” book.)

Personality is a gestalt of ever-changing perception. It is the part of the identity which perceives. I do not force my perceptions upon the woman through whom I speak, nor is her consciousness blotted out during our communications. Instead there is an expansion of her consciousness and a projection of energy that is directed away from three-dimensional reality.

I am aware of a different kind of experience, not linear, and can focus upon and react to an infinite variety of simultaneous events. Ruburt could not express them, and so they must be leveled out into linear expression if they are to be communicated. This ability to perceive and react to unlimited simultaneous events is a basic characteristic of each whole self or entity. Therefore, I do not claim it as some feat that is exclusively my own.

My environment, now, is not the one in which you will find yourself immediately after death. I cannot help speaking humorously, but you must die many times before you enter this particular plane of existence. (Birth is much more of a shock than death. Sometimes when you die you do not realize it, but birth almost always implies a sharp and sudden recognition. So there is no need to fear death. And I, who have died more times than I care to tell, write this book to tell you so.)

We do not use permanent structures. There is not a city or a town, for example, in which I dwell. I do not mean to imply that we are off in empty space. For one thing we do not think of space as you do, and we form whatever particular images we want to surround us.

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.

Permanency and stability basically have nothing to do with form, but with the integration of pleasure, purpose, accomplishment, and identity. I “travel” to many other levels of existence in order to fulfill my duties, which are primarily those of a teacher and educator, and I use whatever aids and techniques serve me best within those systems.

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, 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.

Because we do communicate in this manner, this does not necessarily mean that we use mental words, for we do not. We communicate instead through what I can only call thermal and electromagnetic images that are capable of supporting much more meaning in one “sequence.” The intensity of the communication is dependent upon the emotional intensity behind it, although the phrase “emotional intensity” may be misleading.

We do feel an equivalent of what you call emotions, though these are not the love or hate or anger that you know. Your feelings can best be described as the three-dimensional materializations of far greater psychological events and experiences that are related to the “inner senses.”

Our identities do not feel threatened, for example, by the strong emotions of another. We are able to travel through emotions in a way that is not now natural to you, and to translate them into other facets of creativity than those with which you are familiar. We do not feel the need to conceal emotions, for we know it is basically impossible and undesirable. Within your system they can appear troublesome because you have not yet learned how to use them. We are only now learning their full potential, and the powers of creativity with which they are connected.