“Seth material” search engine (Jane Roberts)

Now: I have spent some time emphasizing the fact that each of us forms our own environment, because I want you to realize that the responsibility for your life and your environment is your own.

I have also discussed reincarnation in terms of environment because many schools of thought over-emphasize the effects of reincarnational existences, so that often they explain present-life circumstances as a result of rigid and uncompromising patterns determined in a “past” life. You will feel relatively incompetent to handle present physical reality, to alter your environment, to affect and change your world, if you feel that you are at the mercy of conditions over which you have no control.

As I explained earlier, the lives or the plays are happening at once. Creativity and consciousness are never linear achievements. In each life you choose and create your own settings or environments; and in this one you chose your parents and whatever childhood incidents that came within your experience. You wrote the script.

(9:35.) Like a true absent-minded professor, the conscious self forgets all this, however, so when tragedy appears in the script, difficulty or challenges, the conscious self looks for someone or something to blame. Before this book is done I hope to show you precisely how you create each minute of your experience so that you can begin to exert your true creative responsibility on a conscious level — or nearly so.

As you read this book, now and then look about you at the room in which you sit. Chairs and tables, the ceilings and the floors, may seem very real and solid — quite permanent — while you by contrast may feel yourself to be highly vulnerable, caught in a moment between birth and extinction. You may even feel jealous when you think of it, imagining that the physical universe will continue to exist long after you are gone. By the end of our book, however, I hope you will realize the eternal validity of your own consciousness, and the impermanence of those physical aspects of your environment, and of your universe, that now seem so secure. Do you have that?

The same question of course applies when you read a newspaper, and when you speak to another person. Your actual words convey information, feelings, or thoughts. Obviously the thoughts or the feelings, and the words, are not the same thing. The letters upon the page are symbols, and you have agreed upon various meanings connected with them. You take it for granted without even thinking of it that the symbols — the letters — are not the reality — the information or thoughts — which they attempt to convey.

Now in the same way, I am telling you that objects are also symbols that stand for a reality whose meaning the objects, like the letters, transmit. The true information is not in the objects any more than the thought is in the letters or in words. Words are methods of expression. So are physical objects in a different kind of medium. You are used to the idea that you express yourselves directly through words. You can hear yourself speak them. You can feel the muscles in your throat move, and if you are aware, you can perceive multitudinous reactions within your own body — actions that all accompany your speech.

(10:29.) Physical objects are the result of another kind of expression. You create them as surely as you create words. I do not mean that you create them with your hands alone, or through manufacture. I mean that objects are natural by-products of the evolution of your species, even as words are. Examine for a moment your knowledge of your own speech, however. Though you hear the words and recognize their appropriateness, and though they may more or less approximate an expression of your feeling, they are not your feeling, and there must be a gap between your thought and your expression of it.

You do not know how you translate these symbols upon this page into thoughts, and then store them, or make them your own. Since the mechanisms of normal speech are so little known to you on a conscious level, then it is not surprising that you are equally unaware of more complicated tasks that you also perform — such as the constant creation of your physical environment as a method of communication and expression.

I am pleased with the beginning of my chapter, for I think I have hit upon an analogy, and a true one, that will release the reader from the artificial bondage of physical form. When he sees it as a method of his own expression, he will realize his own creativeness.

(10:38. Jane’s trance had been good, her pace rather slow. She said the two-minute pause at the start of the delivery took place because she was consciously “hung up” over how Seth was going to begin Chapter Five. She also realized that if she “just sat there,” Seth would do okay on his own.

(Long pause at 11:01.) You have heard the expression before, I am sure, that the environment expresses a particular individual’s personality. I am telling you that this is a literal and not symbolic truth. The letters upon the page have the reality only of ink and paper. The information they convey is invisible. As an object, this book itself is only paper and ink. It is a carrier of information.

You may perhaps argue that the book was manufactured physically, and did not suddenly erupt through Ruburt’s skull, already printed and bound. You in turn had to borrow or purchase the book, so you may think, “Surely, I did not create the book, as I created my words.” But before we are finished we will see that basically speaking, each of you create the book you hold in your hands, and that your entire physical environment comes as naturally out of your inner mind as words come out of your mouths, and that man forms physical objects as unselfconsciously and as automatically as he forms his own breath.