“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: The senses that you use, in a very real manner, create the environment that you perceive. Your physical senses necessitate the perception of a three-dimensional reality. Consciousness is equipped with inner perceptors, however. These are inherent within all consciousness, regardless of its development. These perceptors operate quite independently from those that might be assumed when a given consciousness adopts a specialized form, such as a physical body, in order to operate in a particular system.

Each reader, therefore, has inner senses, and to some extent uses them constantly, though he is not aware of doing so at an egotistical level. Now, we use the inner senses quite freely and consciously. If you were to do so, then you would perceive the same kind of environment in which I have my existence. You would see an uncamouflaged situation, in which events and form were free and not stuck in a jellylike mold of time. You could see, for example, your present living room not only as a conglomeration of permanent-appearing furniture, but switch your focus and see the immense and constant dance of molecules and other particles that compose the various objects.

Using the inner senses, we become conscious creators, cocreators. But you are unconscious cocreators whether you know it or not. If our environment seems unstructured to you, it is only because you do not understand the true nature of order, which has nothing to do with permanent form, but only appears to have form from your perspective.

Our psychological structures are different, practically speaking, in that we consciously utilize a multidimensional psychological reality that you inherently possess, but are unfamiliar with at an egotistical level. It is natural, then, that our environment would have multidimensional qualities that the physical senses would never perceive.

It is quite true that your physical senses create the reality that they perceive. A tree is something far different to a microbe, a bird, an insect, and a man who stands beneath it. I am not saying that the tree only appears to be different. It is different. You perceive its reality through one set of highly specialized senses. This does not mean that its reality exists in that form in any more basic way than it exists in the form perceived by the microbe, insect, or bird. You cannot perceive the quite valid reality of that tree in any context but your own. This applies to anything within the physical system that you know.

It is not that physical reality is false. It is that the physical picture is simply one of an infinite number of ways of perceiving the various guises through which consciousness expresses itself. The physical senses force you to translate experience into physical perceptions. The inner senses open your range of perception, allow you to interpret experience in a far freer manner and to create new forms and new channels through which you, or any consciousness, can know itself.

Consciousness is, among other things, a spontaneous exercise in creativity. You are learning now, in a three-dimensional context, the ways in which your emotional and psychic existence can create varieties of physical form. You manipulate within the psychic environment, and these manipulations are then automatically impressed upon the physical mold. Now our environment is in itself creative in a different manner than yours. Your environment is creative in that trees bear fruit, that there is a self-sustaining principle, that the earth feeds its own, for example. The naturally creative aspects are the materializations of the deepest psychic, spiritual, and physical inclinations of the species, set up in your terms eons ago, and a part of the racial bank of psychic knowledge.

We endow the elements of our environment with an even greater creativity that is difficult to explain. We do not have flowers that grow, for example. But the intensity, the condensed psychic strength of our psychological natures forms new dimensions of activity. If you paint a picture within three-dimensional existence, then the painting must be on a flat surface, merely hinting at the complete three-dimensional experience that you cannot insert into it. In our environment, however, we could actually create whatever dimensional effects we desired. All of these abilities are not ours alone. They are your heritage. As you will see later in this book, you exercise your own inner senses, and multidimensional abilities, more frequently than it might seem, in other states of consciousness than the normal, waking one.

Your own physical environment appears as it does to you because of your own psychological structure. If you gained your sense of personal continuity through associative processes primarily, rather than as a result of the familiarity of self moving through time, then you would experience physical reality in an entirely different fashion. Objects from past and present could be perceived at once, their presence justified through associative connections. Say that your father throughout his lifetime has eight favorite chairs. If your perceptive mechanisms were primarily set up as a result of intuitive association rather than time sequence, then you would perceive all of these chairs at one time; or seeing one, you would be aware of the others. So environment is not a separate thing in itself, but the result of perceptive patterns, and these are determined by psychological structure.

So if you want to know what my environment is like, you will have to understand what I am. In order to explain, I shall have to speak about the nature of consciousness in general. In doing so I shall end up telling you much about yourself. The inner portions of your identity are already aware of much that I will tell you. Part of my purpose is to acquaint your egotistical self with knowledge that is already known to a larger portion of your own consciousness, that you have long ignored.

You look out into the physical universe, and interpret reality according to the information received from your “outer senses.” I will stand, figuratively speaking, in physical reality and look inward for you, and describe those realities of consciousness and experience that you are presently too fascinated to see. For you are fascinated with physical reality, and you are in as deep a trance now as the woman is through whom I write this book.

All of your attention is focused in a highly specialized way upon one shining, bright point that you call reality. There are other realities all about you, but you ignore their existence, and you blot out all stimuli that come from them. There is a reason for such a trance, as you will discover, but little by little you must wake up. My purpose is to open your inner eyes.