“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now, good evening.

We will now begin our next chapter. It is, I believe, Chapter Four.

(Pause at 9:24.) Now stated simply, time is not a series of moments. The words that you speak, the acts that you perform, appear to take place in time, as a chair or table appears to take up space. These appearances however are a part of the complicated props that you have set up “beforehand,” and within the play you must accept these as real.

Each of you are now involved in a much larger production, in which you all agree on certain basic assumptions that serve as a framework within which the play can occur. The assumptions are that time is a series of moments one after another; that an objective world exists quite independently of your own creation and perception of it; that you are bound within the physical bodies that you have donned; and that you are limited by time and space.

(9:35.) Other assumptions accepted for the same reason include the idea that all perception comes through your physical senses; in other words, that all information comes from without, and that no information can come from within. You therefore are forced to focus intensely upon the actions of the play. Now these various plays, these creative period pieces represent what you would call reincarnational lives.

Now: Incidentally (humorously), you need not record this. My “now’s,” beginning a sentence, are often simply cues to you, and need not necessarily go along with our script.

Now (humorously louder): in some plays, generally speaking, the actors are each working on a seemingly minute portion of a larger problem that the play itself is to resolve.

(10:26.) You are the multidimensional self who has these existences, who creates and takes part in these cosmic passion plays, so to speak. It is only because you focus in this particular role now that you identify your entire being with it. You have set these rules for yourself for a reason. And consciousness is in a state of becoming, and so this multidimensional self of which I speak is not a psychological structure completed and done with. It is also in a state of becoming.

You therefore create far more environments than you realize. Now, each actor, going about the role, focused within the play, has an inner guide line. He is not left, therefore, abandoned within a play that he has forgotten in his own creation. He has knowledge and information that comes to him through what I call the inner senses.

Now: The meaning of the play is within you, therefore. It is only the conscious portion of you that acts so well, and that is focused so securely within the props of the production.

Now it seems to you, of course, that you are the only conscious part of yourself, for you are identifying with the actor in this particular production. The other portions of your multidimensional personality, in these other reincarnational plays, are also conscious, however. And because you are a multidimensional consciousness, “you” are also conscious in other realities beside these.

End of dictation. Now give us a moment.

(11:24 P.M. Seth’s production of his book had come to be a natural part of the framework by now. He was also beginning to deviate somewhat from the outline he’d given in the 510th session on January 10, 1970, but we had expected this. Seth was on his own, Jane said. Many people knew about his book by now.