“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

There is no four o’clock in the afternoon or nine o’clock in the evening in my environment. By this I mean that I am not restricted to a time sequence. There is nothing preventing me from experiencing such sequences if I choose. We experience time, or what you would call its equivalent nature, in terms of intensities of experience — a psychological time with its own peaks and valleys.

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.

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.

And I end our session. We are close to the end of Chapter Two. Now I wish you good evening.