“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now your closest environment, physically speaking, is your body. It is not like some manikin-shape in which you are imprisoned, that exists apart from you like a casing. Your body is not beautiful or ugly, healthy or deformed, swift or slow simply because this is the kind of body that was thrust upon you indiscriminately at birth. Instead your physical form, your corporeal personal environment, is the physical materialization of your own thoughts, emotions, and interpretations.

You are made basically of the same ingredients as a chair, a stone, a head of lettuce, a bird. In a gigantic cooperative endeavor, all consciousness joins together to make the forms that you perceive. Now, because this is known to us, we can change our environments and our own physical forms as we wish, and without confusion, for we perceive the reality that lies beneath.

We also realize that permanency of form is an illusion, since all consciousness must be in a state of change. We can be, in your terms, in several places at once because we realize the true mobility of consciousness. Now whenever you think emotionally of another person, you send out a counterpart of yourself, beneath the intensity of matter, but a definite form. This form, projecting outward from your own consciousness, completely escapes your egotistical attention. When I think emotionally of someone else, I do the same thing, except that a portion of my consciousness is within the image, and can communicate.

(At 9:56, though, as she sat waiting to go back into trance, Jane said, “Either I’m tired tonight, or the house is getting to me, but now it’s harder to get going….” Resume at 9:58.)

Now you do the same thing when you sit in your living room, but you do not realize what you are doing; and presently you are somewhat restricted. When my associates and I meet, we often translate each other’s thoughts into various shapes and forms out of pure enjoyment in the practice. We have what you might call a game, demanding some expertise, where for our own amusement we see which of us can translate any given thought into the most numerous forms. (Pause.)

If you perceived the constant change within your body with as much persistence as you attend to its seemingly permanent nature, then you would be amazed that you ever considered the body as one more or less constant, more or less cohesive, entity. Even subjectively you focus upon and indeed manufacture the idea of a relatively stable, relatively permanent conscious self. You stress those ideas and thoughts and attitudes that you recall from “past” experience as your own, completely ignoring those that once were “characteristic” and now are vanished — ignoring the fact also that you cannot hold thought. The thought of a moment before, in your terms, vanishes away.

Now: That is the end of dictation for this evening.

(Now Seth briefly discussed some out-of-body episodes that Jane had experienced yesterday afternoon.)

Now good evening.