“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

You may think of your soul or entity — though only briefly and for the sake of this analogy — as some conscious and living, divinely inspired computer who programs its own existences and lifetimes. But this computer is so highly endowed with creativity that each of the various personalities it programs spring into consciousness and song, and in turn create realities that may have been undreamed of by the computer itself.

(9:25.) Each such personality, however, comes with a built-in idea of the reality in which it will operate, and its mental equipment is highly tailored to meet very specialized environments. It has full freedom, but it must operate within the context of existence to which it has been programmed. Within the personality, however, in the most secret recesses, is the condensed knowledge that resides in the computer as a whole. I must emphasize that I am not saying that the soul or entity is a computer, but only asking you to look at the matter in this light in order to make several points clear.

Each personality has within it the ability not only to gain a new type of existence in the environment — in your case in physical reality — but to add creatively to the very quality of its own consciousness, and in so doing to work its way through the specialized system, breaking the barriers of reality as it knows it.

(9:30.) Now, there is a purpose in all this that will also be discussed later. I mention this whole subject here, however, because I want you to see that your environment is not real in the terms that you imagine it to be. When you are born, then, you are already “conditioned” to perceive reality in a particular manner, and to interpret experience in a very limited but intense range.

I must explain this before I can clearly give you an idea of my environment, or of those other systems of reality in which I operate. There is no space between my environment and yours, for example, no physical boundaries that separate us. In a very real way of speaking, your concept of reality as seen through your physical senses, scientific instruments, or arrived at through deduction, bears little resemblance to the facts — and the facts are difficult to explain.

Your planetary systems exist at once, simultaneously, both in time and in space. The universe that you seem to perceive, either visually or through instruments, appears to be composed of galaxies, stars, and planets, at various distances from you. Basically, however, this is an illusion. Your senses and your very existence as physical creatures program you to perceive the universe in such a way. The universe as you know it is your interpretation of events as they intrude upon your three-dimensional reality. The events are mental. This does not mean that you cannot travel to other planets, for example, within that physical universe, any more than it means that you cannot use tables to hold books, glasses, and oranges (as our coffee table did at that moment), although the table has no solid qualities of its own.

Root assumptions are those built-in ideas of reality of which I spoke — those agreements upon which you base your ideas of existence. Space and time, for example, are root assumptions. Each system of reality has its own set of such agreements. When I communicate within your system, I must use and understand the root assumptions upon which it is based. As a teacher it is part of my job to understand and use these, and I have had existences in many such systems as a part of what you may call my basic training; though in your terms my associates and I had other names for them.

When I enter your system, I intrude into three-dimensional reality, and you must interpret what happens in the light of your own root assumptions. Now whether or not you realize it, each of you intrudes into other systems of reality in your dream states without the full participation of your normally conscious self. In subjective experience you leave behind physical existence and act, at times, with strong purpose and creative validity within dreams that you forget the instant you awaken.

(10:17.) When I contact your reality, therefore, it is as if I were entering one of your dreams. I can be aware of myself as I dictate this book through Jane Roberts, and yet also be aware of myself in my own environment; for I send only a portion of myself here, as you perhaps send out a portion of your consciousness as you write a letter to a friend, and yet are aware of the room in which you sit. I send out much more than you do in a letter, for a portion of my consciousness is now within the entranced woman as I dictate, but the analogy is close enough.

My environment, as I mentioned earlier, is not one of a personality recently dead in your terms, but later I will describe what you can expect under those conditions. One large difference between your environment and mine is that you must physically materialize mental acts as physical matter. We understand the reality of mental acts and recognize their brilliant validity. We accept them for what they are, and therefore we are beyond the necessity to materialize them and interpret them in such a rigid manner.

Now some of you who read this book will immediately and intuitively grasp what I am saying, for you will have already suspected that you are viewing experience through highly distorted, though colorful, figurative lenses. Remember also that if physical reality is in a larger sense an illusion, it is an illusion caused by a greater reality. The illusion itself has a purpose and a meaning.

Perhaps it is better to say that physical reality is one form that reality takes. In your system, however, you are focused much more intensely upon one relatively small aspect of experience.

We can travel freely through varying numbers of such realities. Our experience at this point includes our work in each. I do not mean to minimize the importance of your present personalities, nor of physical existence. To the contrary.