“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

In the first place, language as you know it is a slow affair: letter by letter strung out to make a word, and words to make a sentence, the result of a linear thought pattern. Language, as you know it, is partially and grammatically the end product of your physical time sequences. You can only focus upon so many things at one time, and your language structure is not given to the communication of intricate, simultaneous experience.

Each reader, being presently ensconced within a physical form, I presume (humorously), knows only a small portion of himself — as I mentioned earlier. The entity is the overall identity of which his personality is one manifestation — an independent and eternally valid portion. In these communications, therefore, Ruburt’s consciousness expands, and yet focuses in a different dimension, a dimension between his reality and mine, a field relatively free of distraction. Here I impress certain concepts upon him, with his permission and assent. They are not neutral, in that all knowledge or information bears the stamp of the personality who holds it or passes it on.

(Long pause, one of many. But overall Jane’s pace was faster and more confident than in the first two sessions dealing with Seth’s book. She also liked what Seth had done on his book so far.)

That is the end of Chapter One.

My present existence is the most challenging one that I have known, and I have known many, both physical and nonphysical. There is not just one dimension in which nonphysical consciousness resides, any more than there is only one country on your planet or planet within your solar system.

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.

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.

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.

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.